CBSE Class 10 Social Science The Making of a Global World Notes Set 03

Why global links matter

Trade, migration, the movement of capital and the spread of ideas have connected distant parts of the world for thousands of years. This chapter traces how the world became more closely knit, who gained and who suffered, and how the modern global economy took shape.

The pre-modern world

The silk routes were overland and sea networks that linked Asia with Europe and northern Africa. They existed before the Christian era and flourished until about the fifteenth century. They are named after the Chinese silk carried westwards, but Chinese pottery, textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia moved too, and precious metals flowed from Europe to Asia. Along the routes travelled traders, missionaries, pilgrims and travellers, and with them religions such as Buddhism and Christianity, and later Islam.

Food also travelled. Noodles probably moved from China to the west and became spaghetti; Arab traders took pasta to Sicily. Many common foods, such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies and sweet potatoes, were unknown in Europe and Asia until Columbus reached the Americas in 1492 and the Americas were linked to the rest of the world. Potatoes then helped poor Europeans live better, while an Irish potato famine in the 1840s caused mass death.

Conquest, disease and trade

From the sixteenth century Europe's sailors, using better ships and maps, reached the Americas. The Portuguese and the Spanish conquered the continent, not mainly through weapons but through germs. Americans had no immunity to diseases such as smallpox that Europeans carried, and the disease killed large numbers and weakened resistance. Conquerors also forced local people to work in mines and plantations. Silver from mines in Potosi in present Bolivia and Mexico financed European trade with Asia. The legend of El Dorado, a city of gold, attracted adventurers. By the seventeenth century Europeans had turned to plantations in the Americas where African slaves were used, and the trade in slaves continued until the early nineteenth century.

The nineteenth century

In the nineteenth century the world economy changed. Population growth in Britain raised the demand for food, and the Corn Laws, which restricted imports, were abolished. Food from America, Australia and Eastern Europe flooded in. Railways, steamships and later refrigerated ships made it possible to transport meat. Many Europeans, escaping poverty, hunger and religious conflict, migrated to America and Australia.

In Africa, rinderpest, a cattle disease which arrived in the 1890s, killed most cattle and gave colonisers a means to force Africans into wage labour. In India and China, indentured labourers hired under contract went to plantations in the Caribbean, Fiji and Mauritius. Their working conditions were harsh, and the system was described as a new form of slavery. India supplied raw cotton and opium and received British goods, giving Britain a trade surplus that paid for 'home charges'. Indian traders and bankers financed agriculture in Africa and Southeast Asia.

Between the wars and after

The First World War was fought with modern weapons and left deep damage. Mass production, introduced by Henry Ford using the assembly line, raised output in the United States in the 1920s. Overproduction, falling prices and a collapse of the banking system led to the Great Depression of 1929, which lasted till the mid-1930s. Indian exports and imports nearly halved between 1928 and 1934, farm prices fell sharply, and jute growers in Bengal fell into debt as raw jute prices crashed by over 60 per cent.

After the Second World War, a conference at Bretton Woods in the USA in July 1944 set up the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), called the Bretton Woods twins. The system used fixed exchange rates with currencies pegged to the dollar. In the 1970s this system broke down, floating exchange rates replaced it, and developing countries, grouped as the G-77, asked for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) for control over their natural resources and fairer prices.

Worked examples

Example 1. How did disease help in the conquest of the Americas?
Answer: European germs, especially smallpox, spread among people with no immunity and killed millions. The weakened societies could not resist the invaders.

Example 2. Why was indentured labour called a new system of slavery?
Answer: Workers signed contracts without understanding the terms and were often deceived by agents. On arrival they faced long hours, poor housing and little freedom to leave.

Example 3. What happened to Indian jute growers during the Depression?
Answer: Gunny bag exports collapsed, so the price of raw jute fell by more than 60 per cent. Farmers who had borrowed money sank deeper into debt.

Quick Check Questions