CBSE Class 9 History Peasants And Farmers Worksheet

Question 1. Who was Captain Swing? And point out significance of the letters written to the farmers with the name of Captain Swing in the Agricultural History of England
Answer. 1) Captain Swing was a mythic name used in the letters written to the farmers in the month of June-August 1830.
2) Farmers received threatening letters signed by Captain Swing urging them to stop using machines that deprived workmen of their livelihood. Alarmed landlords feared attacks by armed bands at night, and many destroyed their own machines 3. Government action was severe. Those suspected of rioting were rounded up.

Question 2. Describe the features of the open field and common land existed in England till early 18 the Century. And state how was it helpful to the poor?  

Question 3. Trace the factors responsible for the outbreak of the Enclosure Movement in England.
Answer.1) When the price of wool went up in the world market in the sixteenth century, rich farmers wanted to expand wool production to earn profits. So they began dividing and enclosing common land and building hedges around their holdings to separate their property from that of others.
2) Unlike the sixteenth-century enclosures that promoted sheep farming, the land being enclosed in the late eighteenth century was for grain production because the English population expanded rapidly demanding for more food grains to feed the population.
3) Britain at this time was industrializing. More and more people began to live and work in urban areas. Men from rural areas migrated to towns in search of jobs. To survive they had to buy food grains in the market.
4) By the end of the eighteenth century, France was at war with England. This disrupted trade and the import of food grains from Europe.
5) Prices of food grains in England sky rocketed, encouraging landowners to enclose lands and enlarge the area under grain cultivation. Profits flowed in and landowners pressurized the Parliament to pass the Enclosure Acts.

Question 4. Examine the steps taken to meet with the increasing demand of food grains due to the increase in population.
Answer.1) The population increased rapidly, in 1868 England was producing about 80 per cent of the food it consumed. The rest was imported.
2) This increase in food-grain production was made possible not by any radical innovations in agricultural technology, but by bringing new lands under cultivation.
3) Landlords sliced up pasturelands, carved up open fields, cut up forest commons, took over marshes, and turned larger and larger areas into agricultural fields.
4) Enclosures were now seen as necessary to make long-term investments on land and plan crop rotations to improve the soil.
5) Enclosures also allowed the richer landowners to expand the land under their control and produce more for the market.

Question 5. Examine the impact of the Enclosure of the Common land on the poor people of England.
Answer.1) When fences came up, the enclosed land became the exclusive property of one landowner.
2) The poor could no longer collect their firewood from the forests, or graze their cattle on the commons.
3) They could no longer collect apples and berries, or hunt small animals for meat. Nor could they gather the stalks that lay on the fields after the crops were cut. Everything belonged to the landlords; everything had a price which the poor could not afford to pay.
4) Deprived of their rights and driven off the land, they tramped in search of work. From the Midlands, they moved to the southern counties of England.
5) This was a region that was most intensively cultivated, and there was a great demand for agricultural laborers. But nowhere could the poor find secure jobs.

Question 6. Briefly describe the effects of Napoleonic wars and introduction of threshing machine on the English agriculture.
OR Describe the conditions that led to the Captain Swing riots in England after the Napoleonic wars. 
Answer.1) During the Napoleonic Wars, prices of food grains were high and farmers expanded production vigorously. Fearing a shortage of labour, they began buying the new threshing machines that had come into the market.
2) They complained of the insolence of labourers, their drinking habits, and the difficulty of making them work. The machines, they thought, would help them reduce their dependence on labourers.
3) After the Napoleonic Wars had ended, thousands of soldiers returned to the villages. They needed alternative jobs to survive. But this was a time when grain from Europe began flowing into England, prices declined, and an Agricultural Depression set in.
4) Anxious, landowners began reducing the area they cultivated and demanded that the imports of crops be stopped. They tried to cut wages and the number of workmen they employed. The unemployed poor tramped from village to village, and those with uncertain jobs lived in fear of a loss of their livelihood.
5) This led to the Captain Swing riots spread in the countryside at this time. For the poor the threshing machines had become a sign of bad times.

Question 7. Briefly explain the Westward expansion of White Settlement in USA and its impact on agriculture.
Answer.1) After the American War of Independence from 1775 to 1783 and the formation of the United States of America, the white Americans began to move westward. The American Indians had to be cleared from the land.
2) American Indians retreated, the settlers poured in. They slashed and burnt forests, pulled out the stumps, cleared the land for cultivation, they cleared larger areas, and erected fences around the fields. They ploughed the land and sowed corn and wheat.
3) When the soil became impoverished and exhausted in one place, the migrants would move further west, to explore new lands and raise a new crop.
4) It was, however, only after the 1860s that settlers swept into the Great Plains across the River Mississippi. In subsequent decades this region became a major wheat-producing area of America.

Question 8. Describe the advantages of the use of machines in agriculture in USA. 
Answer.1) Through the nineteenth century, as the settlers moved into new habitats and new lands, they modified their implements to meet their requirements.
2) Before the 1830s, the grain used to be harvested with a cradle or sickle.
3) At harvest time, hundreds of men and women could be seen in the fields cutting the crop.
4) By the early twentieth century, most farmers were using combined harvesters to cut grain. With one of these machines, 500 acres of wheat could be harvested in two weeks.
5) The new machines allowed these big farmers to rapidly clear large tracts, break up the soil, remove the grass and prepare the ground for cultivation. The work could be done quickly and with a minimal number of hands.

Question 9. Examine the consequence of the mechanized agricultural production in USA on the poor.
Answer.1) For the poorer farmers, machines brought misery. Many of them bought these machines, imagining that wheat prices would remain high and profits would flow in.
2) If they had no money, the banks offered loans. Those who borrowed found it difficult to pay back their debts. Many of them deserted their farms and looked for jobs elsewhere.
3) But jobs were difficult to find. Mechanization had reduced the need for labour. And the boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seemed to have come to an end by the mid- 1920s.
4) Wheat prices fell and export markets collapsed.
5) This created the grounds for the Great Agrarian Depression of the 1930s that ruined wheat farmers everywhere

Question 10. Assess the growth of wheat production in USA in 19th and 20th centuries. 
Answer.1) From the late nineteenth century, there was a dramatic expansion of wheat production in the USA.
2) The urban population in the USA was growing and the export market was becoming ever bigger.
3) As the demand increased, wheat prices rose, encouraging farmers to produce wheat. The spread of the railways made it easy to transport the grain from the wheat-growing regions to the eastern coast for export.
4) By the early twentieth century the demand became even higher, and during the First World War the world market boomed. Russian supplies of wheat were cut off and the USA had to feed Europe.
5. In 1910, about 45 million acres of land in the USA was under wheat. Nine years later, the area had expanded to 74 million acres, an increase of about 65 %.

Question 11. How the Great Plains of USA was turned into a dust bowl?
Answer.1) When wheat cultivation had expanded dramatically in the early nineteenth century, zealous farmers had recklessly uprooted all vegetation, and tractors had turned the soil over, and broken the sod into dust.
2) In the 1930s, terrifying dust storms began to blow over the southern plains. Black blizzards rolled in, very often 7,000 to 8,000 feet high, rising like monstrous waves of muddy water.
3) As the skies darkened, and the dust swept in, people were blinded and choked. Cattle were suffocated to death, their lungs caked with dust and mud. Sand buried fences, covered fields, and coated the surfaces of rivers till the fish died.
4) The wind blew with ferocious speed.
5) But ordinary dust storms became black blizzards only because the entire landscape had been ploughed over, stripped of all grass that held it together

Question 12. Briefly describe how the demand of Chinese tea in Britain resulted in the Opium cultivation in India and Opium trade with China. 
Answer.1) The history of opium production in India was linked up with the story of British trade with China. In the late eighteenth century, the English East India Company was buying tea and silk from China for sale in England.
2) As tea became a popular English drink, the tea trade became more and more important. This created a problem. England at this time produced nothing that could be easily sold in China
3) They could buy tea only by paying in silver coins or bullion. This meant an outflow of treasure from England, a prospect that created widespread anxiety. They searched for a commodity they could sell in China, something they could persuade the Chinese to buy. Opium was such a commodity.
4) The Chinese were aware of the dangers of opium addiction, and the Emperor had forbidden its production and sale except for medicinal purposes.
5) But Western merchants in the mid-eighteenth century began an illegal trade in opium, leading to the opium war and the occupation of China by Europeans and USA.

Question 13. Why were the Indian farmers unwilling to cultivate opium? (Poppy)
Answer.1) First ,the crop had to be grown on the best land ,on the fields that lya near village and were well manured .On this land peasants produced pulses.If they planted opium on this land, then pulses could not be grown there, or they would have to be grown on inferior land where harvests were poorer and uncertain.
2) Second, many cultivators owned no land. To cultivate, they had to pay rent and lease land from landlords. And the rent charged on good lands near villages was very high.
3) Third, the cultivation of opium was a difficult process. The plant was delicate, and cultivators had to spend long hours nurturing it. This meant that they did not have enough time to care for other crops.
4) Finally, the price the government paid to the cultivators for the opium they produced was very low. It was unprofitable for cultivators to grow opium at that price

Question 14. How were the unwilling Indian cultivators made to produce opium by the British?
Answer.1) Unwilling cultivators were made to produce opium through a system of advances. In the rural areas of Bengal and Bihar, there were large numbers of poor peasants.
2) From the 1780s, such peasants found their village headmen (mahato) giving them money advances to produce opium. When offered a loan, the cultivators were tempted to accept, hoping to meet their immediate needs and pay back the loan at a later stage.
3) By taking the loan, the cultivator was forced to grow opium on a specified area of land and hand over the produce to the agents once the crop had been harvested.
4) He had no option of planting the field with a crop of his choice or of selling his produce to anyone but the government agent. And he had to accept the low price offered for the produce.

Question 15. Describe the expansion of opium cultivation in India and how the British maintained its monopoly over the trade:
Answer. 1) By 1773, the British government in Bengal had established a monopoly to trade in opium. No one else was legally permitted to trade in the product.
2) By the 1820s, the British found to their horror that opium production in their territories was rapidly declining, but its production outside the British territories was increasing.
3) It was being produced in Central India and Rajasthan, within princely states that were not under British control.
4) To the British this trade was illegal: it was smuggling and it had to be stopped.
5) Government monopoly had to be retained. It therefore instructed its agents posted in the princely states to confiscate all opium and destroy the crops.