CBSE Class 10 Social Science History The Making of a Global World Hindi Assignment

The Making of a Global World Summary Class 10 Social Science

The Pre-Modern World
The ‘globalization’ refers to an economic system that has emerged since the last 50 years .The global world has a long history comprising the trade and migration of people in search of work, the movement of capital, and much else. As we think about the dramatic and visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today, we need to understand the phases through which this world in which we live has emerged.

From ancient times, travelers, traders, priests and pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity and spiritual fulfillment, or to escape persecution. They carried goods, money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases. As early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valley civilizations with present-day West Asia. For more than a millennia, cowries (the Hindi cowdior seashells, used as a form of currency) from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa. The long-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced as far back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had become an unmistakable link.

Silk Routes
The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade and cultural links between distant parts of the world. The name ‘silk routes’ points to the importance of West-bound Chinese silk cargoes along this route. Historians have identified several silk routes, overland and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linking Asia with Europe and northern Africa. They are known to have existed since before the Christian era and thrived almost till the fifteenth century. But Chinese pottery also travelled the same route, as did textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return, precious metals – gold and silver – flowed from Europe to Asia. Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. Early Christian missionaries almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, as did early Muslim preachers a few centuries later. Much before all this, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and spread in several directions through intersecting points on the silk routes.

Quest and Victory of America and movement of food crops.
Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. Traders and travelers introduced new crops to the lands they travelled. Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believed that noodles travelled west from China to become spaghetti and Arab traders took pasta to Sicily in fifth-century. Many of our common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chilies, sweet potatoes, and so on were not known to our ancestors until about five centuries ago. These foods were only introduced in Europe and Asia after Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the America. Europeans found precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present day Peru and Mexico also enhanced Europe’s wealth and financed its trade with Asia.(Potosi silver mine in Bolivia) Many expeditions set off in search of El Dorado (Columbia in South America), the fabled city of gold. In mid-sixteenth century, the Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonization of America was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, the Spanish conquerors used the germs of smallpox that they carried on their person as biological warfare. Because of their long isolation, America’s original inhabitants had no immunity against these diseases that came from Europe. Smallpox in particular proved a deadly killer.

In the Irish Potato Famine of 1849. Hungry children started digging for potatoes in a field that has already been harvested, hoping to discover some leftovers. During the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1849), around 1,000,000 people died of starvation in Ireland, and double the number emigrated in search of work.

Migration of people from Europe:
Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in Europe. Cities were crowded and deadly diseases were widespread. Religious conflicts were common, and religious dissenters were persecuted. Thousands therefore fled Europe for America. Here, by the eighteenth century, plantations worked by slaves captured in Africa were growing cotton and sugar for European markets. Until well into the eighteenth century, China and India were among the world’s richest countries. They were also pre-eminent in Asian trade. However, from the fifteenth century, China is said to have restricted overseas contacts and retreated into isolation. China’s reduced role and the rising importance of the Americas gradually moved the centre of world trade westwards. Europe now emerged as the centre of world trade.

Corn Laws
Under pressure from landed groups, the government restricted the import of corn. The laws allowing the government to do this were commonly known as the ‘Corn Laws’. Unhappy with high food prices, industrialists and urban dwellers forced the abolition of the Corn Laws. After the Corn Laws were scrapped, food could be imported into Britain more cheaply than it could be produced within the country. British agriculture was unable to compete with imports. Vast areas of land were now left uncultivated, and thousands of men and women were thrown out of work. They flocked to the cities or migrated overseas.

In 19th century, economists identify three types of movement or ‘flows’ within international economic exchanges. The first is the flow of trade referred largely to trade in goods (e.g., cloth or wheat). The second is the flow of labour – the migration of people in search of employment. The third is the movement of capital for short-term or long-term investments over long distances.

As food prices fell, consumption in Britain rose. From the mid nineteenth century, faster industrial growth in Britain also led to higher incomes, and therefore more food imports. Around the world – in Eastern Europe, Russia, America and Australia – lands were cleared and food production expanded to meet the British demand. It was not enough merely to clear lands for agriculture. Railways were needed to link the agricultural regions to the ports. New harbours had to be built and old ones expanded to ship the new cargoes. People had to settle on the lands to bring them under cultivation. This meant building homes and settlements. All these activities in turn required capital and labour. Capital flowed from financial centers such as London. The demand for labour in places where labour was in short supply – as in America and Australia – led to more migration. Nearly 50 million people emigrated from Europe to America and Australia in the nineteenth century. All over the world some 150 million are estimated to have left their homes, crossed oceans and vast distances over land in search of a better future.

Some of this dramatic change, though on a smaller scale, occurred closer home in west Punjab. Here the British Indian government built a network of irrigation canals to transform semi-desert wastes into fertile agricultural lands that could grow wheat and cotton for export. The Canal Colonies, as the areas irrigated by the new canals were called, were settled by peasants from other parts of Punjab. The regional specialization in the production of commodities developed, and between 1820 and 1914 world trade was estimated to have multiplied25 to 40 times. Nearly 60 per cent of this trade comprised ‘primary products’ – that is, agricultural products such as wheat and cotton, rubber and minerals such as coal to feed British textile mills and industries.

Role of Technology
The railways, steamships, the telegraph, for example, were important inventions without which we cannot imagine the transformed nineteenth-century world. But technological advances were often the result of larger social, political and economic factors. For example, colonization stimulated new investments and improvements in transport: faster railways,

Lighter wagons and larger ships helped move food more cheaply and quickly from faraway farms to final markets. The trade in meat offers a good example of this connected process. Till the 1870s, animals were shipped live from America to Europe and then slaughtered when they arrived there. But live animals took up a lot of ship space. Many also died in voyage, fell ill, lost weight, or became unfit to eat. Meat was hence an expensive luxury beyond the reach of the European poor. High prices in turn kept demand and production down until the development of a new technology, namely, refrigerated ships, which enabled the transport of perishable foods over long distances. Now animals were slaughtered for food at the starting point – in America, Australia or New Zealand – and then transported to Europe as frozen meat. This reduced shipping costs and lowered meat prices in Europe. The poor in Europe could now consume a more varied diet. To the earlier monotony of bread and potatoes many, though not all, could now add meat (and butter and eggs) to their diet. Better living conditions promoted social peace within the country and support for imperialism abroad.

Carvings of Africa
In 1885 the big European powers met in Berlin to complete the carving up of Africa between them. Britain and France made vast additions to their overseas territories in the late nineteenth century. Belgium and Germany became new colonial powers. The US also became a colonial power in the late 1890s by taking over some colonies earlier held by Spain. Let us look at one example of the destructive impact of colonialism on the economy and livelihoods of colonized people. Sir Henry Morton Stanley was a journalist and explorer sent by the New York Herald to find Livingston, a missionary and explorer who had been in Africa for several years. Like other European and American explorers of the time, Stanley went with arms, mobilized local hunters, warriors and laborers to help him, fought with local tribes, investigated African terrains, and mapped different regions. These explorations helped the conquest of Africa. Geographical explorations were not driven by an innocent search for scientific information. They were directly linked to imperial projects.

Rinderpest or the Cattle Plague
In Africa, in the 1890s, a fast-spreading disease of cattle plague or rinderpest had a terrifying impact on people’s livelihoods and the local economy. Historically, Africa had abundant land and a relatively small population. For centuries, land and livestock sustained African livelihoods and people rarely worked for a wage. In the late nineteenth century, Europeans were attracted to Africa due to its vast resources of land and minerals. Europeans came to Africa hoping to establish plantations and mines to produce crops and minerals for export to Europe. But there was an unexpected problem – a shortage of labour willing to work for wages. Employers used many methods to recruit and retain labour. Heavy taxes were imposed which could be paid only by working for wages on plantations and mines. Inheritance laws were changed so that peasants were displaced from land: only one member of a family was allowed to inherit land, as a result of which the others were pushed into the labour market. Mineworkers were also confined in compounds and not allowed to move about freely. Then came rinderpest, a devastating cattle disease. Rinderpest arrived in Africa in the late 1880s. It was carried by infected cattle imported from British Asia to feed the Italian soldiers invading Eritrea in East Africa. Entering Africa in the east, rinderpest moved west ‘like forest fire’, reaching Africa’s Atlantic coast in 1892.It reached the Cape (Africa’s southernmost tip) five years later. Along
the way rinderpest killed 90 per cent of the cattle. The loss of cattle destroyed African livelihoods. Planters, mine owners and colonial governments now successfully monopolized what scarce cattle resources remained, to strengthen their power and to force Africans into the labour market.

Indentured Labour Migration from India
The example of indentured labour migration from India shows faster economic growth as well as great misery, higher incomes for some and poverty for others. In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese labourers went to work on plantations, in mines, and in road and railway construction projects around the world. In India, indentured labourers were hired under contracts which promised return travel to India after they had worked five years on their employer’s plantation. Most Indian indentured workers came from the present-day regions of eastern In the mid-nineteenth century these regions experienced many changes – cottage industries declined, land rent rose, lands were cleared for mines and plantations. All this affected the lives of the poor: they failed to pay their rents, became deeply indebted and were Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, central India and the dry districts of Tamil Nadu. forced to migrate in search of work. The main destinations of Indian indentured migrants were the Caribbean islands (mainly Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam), Mauritius and Fiji. Closer home, Tamil migrants went to Ceylon and Malaya. Indentured workers were also recruited for tea plantations in Assam. Recruitment was done by agents engaged by employers and paid a small commission. Many migrants agreed to take up work hoping to escape poverty or oppression in their home villages. Agents also tempted the prospective migrants by providing false information about final destinations, modes of travel, the nature of the work, and living and working conditions. Often migrants were not even told that they were to embark on a longsea voyage. Sometimes agents even forcibly abducted less willing migrants. Nineteenth-century indenture has been described as a ‘new system of slavery’. On arrival at the plantations, labourers found conditions to be different from what they had imagined. Living and working conditions were harsh, and there were few legal rights. But workers discovered their own ways of surviving. Many of them escaped into the wilds, though if caught they faced severe punishment. Others developed new forms of individual and collective self expression, blending different cultural forms, old and new. In Trinidad the annual Muharram procession was transformed into ariotous carnival called ‘Hosay’ (for Imam Hussain) in which workers of all races and religions joined. Similarly, the protest religion of Rastafarianism (made famous by the Jamaican reggae star BobMarley) is also said to reflect social and cultural links with Indian migrants to the Caribbean. ‘Chutney music’, popular in Trinidad and Guyana, is another creative contemporary expression of the post-indenture experience. These forms of cultural fusion are part of the making of the global world, where things from different places get mixed, lose their original characteristics and become something entirely new. Most indentured workers stayed on after their contracts ended, or returned to their new homes after a short spell in India. There are large communities of people of Indian descent in these countries. Nobel Prize-winning writer V.S. Naipaul, West Indies cricketers Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan. Are such names sound vaguely Indian because they are descended from indentured labour migrants from India. From the 1900s India’s nationalist leaders began opposing the system of indentured labour migration as abusive and cruel. It was abolished in 1921. Yet for a number of decades afterwards, descendants of Indian indentured workers, often thought of as ‘coolies’, remained an uneasy minority in the Caribbean islands. Some of Naipaul’s early novels capture their sense of loss and alienation.

Indian Entrepreneurs Abroad
Many Indian bankers like Shikaripuri Shroffs and Nattukottai Chettiars were amongst the many groups of bankers and traders who financed export agriculture in Central and Southeast Asia, using either their own funds or those borrowed from European banks. They had a sophisticated system to transfer of money over large distances, and even developed indigenous forms of corporate organisation. Indian traders and moneylenders also followed European colonizers into Africa. Hyderabadi Sindhi traders, however, ventured beyond European colonies. From the 1860s they established flourishing emporia at busy ports worldwide, selling local and imported curios to tourists whose numbers were beginning to swell, thanks to the development of safe and comfortable passenger vessels.

Indian Trade, Colonialism and the Global System
Historically, fine cottons produced in India were exported to Europe. With industrialization, British cotton manufacture began to expand, and industrialists pressurized the government to restrict cotton imports and protect local industries. Tariffs were imposed on cloth imports into Britain. Consequently, the inflow of fine Indian cotton began to decline. From the early nineteenth century, British manufacturers also began to seek overseas markets for their cloth. Excluded from the British market by tariff barriers, Indian textiles now faced stiff competition in other international markets. While exports of manufactures declined rapidly, export of raw materials increased equally fast. Between 1812 and 1871, the share of raw cotton exports rose from 5 per cent to 35 per cent. Indigo used for dyeing cloth was another important export for many decades. And, as you have read last year, opium shipments to China grew rapidly from the 1820s to become for a while India’s single largest export. Britain grew opium in India and exported it to China and, with the money earned through this sale, it financed its tea and other imports from China. Over the nineteenth century, raw material exports from India to Britain and the rest of the world increased. But the value of British exports to India was much higher than the value of British imports from India. Thus Britain had a ‘trade surpluses with India. Britain used this surplus to balance its trade deficits with other countries – that is, with countries from which Britain was importing more than it was selling to. Britain’s trade surplus in India also helped pay the so-called ‘home charges’ that included private remittances home by British official sand traders, interest payments on India’s external debt, and pensions of British officials in India.

The Inter-war Economy
The First World War (1914-18) was mainly fought in Europe. But its impact was felt around the world. Notably for our concerns in this chapter, it plunged the first half of the twentieth century into a crisis that took over three decades to overcome. During this period the world experienced widespread economic and political instability, and another catastrophic war.

3.1 Wartime Transformations
The First World War, as you know, was fought between two power blocs. On the one side were the Allies – Britain, France and Russia (later joined by the US); and on the opposite side were the Central Powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. When the war began in August 1914, many governments thought it would-be over by Christmas. It lasted more than four years. The First World War was a war like no other before. The fighting involved the world’s leading industrial nations which now harnessed the vast powers of modern industry to inflict the greatest possible destruction on their enemies. This war was thus the first modern industrial war. It saw the use of machine guns, tanks, aircraft, chemical weapons, etc. on massive scale. These were all increasingly products of modern large scale industry. To fight the war, millions of soldiers had to be recruited from around the world and moved to the frontlines on large ships and trains. The scale of death and destruction – 9 million dead and 20 million injured – was unthinkable before the industrial age, without the use of industrial arms. Most of the killed and maimed were men of working age. These deaths and injuries reduced the able-bodied workforce in Europe. With fewer numbers within the family, household incomes declined after the war. During the war, industries were restructured to produce war-related goods. Entire societies were also reorganized for war – as men went to battle, women stepped in to undertake jobs that earlier only men were expected to do. The war led to the snapping of economic links between some of the world’s largest economic powers which were now fighting each other to pay for them. So Britain borrowed large sums of money from US banks as well as the US public. Thus the war transformed the US from being an international debtor to an international creditor. In other words, at the
war’s end, the US and its citizens owned more overseas assets than foreign governments and citizens owned in the US.

3.2 Post-war Recovery
Post-war economic recovery proved difficult. Britain, which was the world’s leading economy in the pre-war period, in particular faced a prolonged crisis. While Britain was preoccupied with war, industries had developed in India and Japan. After the war Britain found it difficult to recapture its earlier position of dominance in the Indian market, and to compete with Japan internationally. Moreover, to finance war expenditures Britain had borrowed liberally from the US. This meant that at the end of the war Britain was burdened with huge external debts. Unemployment increased and grain prices fell due to overproduction. After the war, Eastern Europe revived its wheat production leading to glut.

The Great Depression of 1929
It signaled acute economic crisis that started during the interregnum phase (period between great wars). It began in 1929 and ended in 1936

Second World War
The Second World War broke out in 1939 just after 20 years of First World War and ended in 1945. In the aftermath of Second World War, the axis power suffered and Germany faced a merciless defeat.

Breton Woods Agreement (July 1944):
To ensure a stable economy, a framework was agreed upon at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held at Breton Woods in New Hampshire, USA. It established the International Monetary Fund and IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development also called as World Bank.)

Cold War and Decolonization:
● After the end of Second World War, the world got divided into two distinct blocs influenced by USA and USSR. The western bloc was dominated by USA (Capitalist bloc) and USSR influenced the Eastern bloc (Communist Bloc).
● From 1947 onwards, the process of decolonization continued for a long time.
● Developing nations integrated themselves into a group called G-77 and demanded a New International Economic Order (NIEO).