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Welcome to CBSE History Chapter 3 Class 10 Notes ¨The Making of a Global World.¨
As we all know Globalization refers to the integration of markets in the global economy, resulting in the increased interconnectedness of national economies. Understanding the history of globalization allows students to grasp the underlying causes of significant social and economic changes.
The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century was a pivotal era in the history of globalization. History Chapter 3 – The Making of a Global World explores the impact of globalization on the world, including the Indian economy. These CBSE Class 10 History notes for Chapter 3 provide students with a concise overview of the key concepts.
By using these notes, students can efficiently recall and review all the important topics from the chapter.
Table of Contents
The Pre-modern World
| Globalisation refers to an economic system that emerged in the last 50 years. However, the global world’s creation has a long history involving trade, migration, people seeking work, capital movement, and more. Since ancient times, travellers, traders, priests, and pilgrims have travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunities, spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. As early as 3000 BCE, an active coastal trade linked the Indus Valley civilisations with present-day West Asia.fulfillment |
Silk Routes Link the World
| The Silk Routes are an excellent example of vibrant pre-modern trade and cultural links between distant parts of the world. Historians have identified several silk routes, both overland and by sea, connecting vast regions of Asia and linking Asia with Europe and northern Africa. In exchange for textiles and spices from India, precious metals like gold and silver flowed from Europe to Asia. |
Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato
| Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. Traders and travellers introduced new crops. For instance, noodles travelled west from China and became spaghetti. About five centuries ago, our ancestors were unfamiliar with common foods like potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies, and sweet potatoes. Many of our common foods came from the original inhabitants of America – the American Indians. |
Conquest, Disease, and Trade
| For centuries, the Indian Ocean had bustling trade with goods, people, knowledge, and customs crisscrossing its waters. Europeans entered and redirected these flows towards Europe. America’s vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to transform trade and life everywhere. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Portuguese and Spanish had decisively conquered and colonised America. The Europeans’ most powerful weapon was not conventional military arms but germs like smallpox, which they carried on their people. Smallpox proved to be a deadly killer. Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in Europe, until well into the eighteenth century, China and India were among the world’s richest countries. However, from the fifteenth century, China restricted overseas contacts and retreated into isolation. Europe then emerged as the center of world trade. |
The Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)
| In the nineteenth century, economic, political, social, cultural, and technological factors interacted in complex ways to transform societies and reshape external relations. Economists identified three main flows or movements: The flow of trade refers largely to goods (e.g., cloth or wheat). The flow of labour – the migration of people in search of employment.The movement of capital for short-term or long-term investments over long distances. |
A World Economy Takes Shape
| In the nineteenth century, self-sufficiency in food meant lower living standards and social conflict in Britain due to population growth from the late eighteenth century. Corn laws were imposed, restricting corn imports. British agriculture couldn’t compete with imports, leaving vast areas of land uncultivated. Thousands of men and women flocked to cities or migrated overseas. Food prices fell in Britain, and mid-nineteenth-century industrial growth led to higher incomes and more food imports. To meet British demand, lands were cleared in Eastern Europe, Russia, America, and Australia to expand food production. Linking railways to agricultural fields and building homes for people required capital and labour. London provided financial help, and people emigrated from Europe to America and Australia in the nineteenth century. By 1890, a global agricultural economy had taken shape, adapting to complex changes in labour movement patterns, capital flows, ecologies, and technology. In West Punjab, the British Indian government built irrigation canals to transform semi-desert wastes into fertile agricultural lands to grow wheat and cotton for export. Cotton cultivation also expanded worldwide to feed British textile mills. |
Role of Technology
| In the nineteenth century, important inventions in technology, like railways, steamships, and the telegraph, transformed the world. Technological advances often result from larger social, political, and economic factors. For example, colonisation 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. Until the 1870s, animals were shipped live from America to Europe. Meat was considered an expensive luxury beyond the reach of the European poor. To break the monotony of bread and potatoes, many could now add meat (and butter and eggs) to their diet. |
Late Nineteenth-Century Colonialism
| Trade flourished, and markets expanded in the late nineteenth century. But there was a darker side, too, as the expansion of trade and closer relationship with the world economy meant loss of freedoms and livelihoods for many parts of the world. In 1885, the big European powers met in Berlin to carve up Africa among themselves. Britain and France made vast additions to their overseas territories. Belgium and Germany became new colonial powers. The US also became a colonial power in the late 1890s by taking over some colonies previously held by Spain. |
Rinderpest, or the Cattle Plague
| In the 1890s, a fast-spreading cattle disease called Rinderpest devastated Africa, impacting people’s livelihoods and the local economy. Africa had abundant land and a relatively small population. 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. However, there was a shortage of labour willing to work for wages. Inheritance laws changed so only one family member could inherit the land. In the late 1880s, Rinderpest arrived in Africa, carried by infected cattle imported from British Asia to feed the Italian soldiers invading Eritrea in East Africa. The loss of cattle destroyed African livelihoods. |
Indentured Labour Migration from India
| Indentured labour illustrates the two-sided nature of the nineteenth-century world, showing both faster economic growth and great misery, higher incomes for some and poverty for others, technological advances in some areas, and new forms of coercion in others. In India, indentured labourers were hired under contracts. Most of them came from present-day eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, central India, and the dry districts of Tamil Nadu. Indian indentured migrants mainly went to the Caribbean islands (mainly Trinidad, Guyana, and Surinam), Mauritius, and Fiji. Indentured workers were also recruited for tea plantations in Assam. Nineteenth-century indenture has been described as a ‘new system of slavery’. In Trinidad, the annual Muharram procession transformed into a riotous carnival called ‘Hosay’, joined by workers of all races and religions. Similarly, the Protestant religion of Rastafarianism reflects social and cultural links with Indian migrants to the Caribbean. In the 1900s, India’s nationalist leaders began opposing the system of indentured labor migration as abusive and cruel. It was abolished in 1921. |
Indian Entrepreneurs Abroad
| People needed a huge amount of capital to grow food and other crops for the world market. So, humble peasant Shikaripuri shroffs and Nattukottai Chettiars were among 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. |
Indian Trade, Colonialism, and the Global System
| India exported cotton to Europe. In Britain, tariffs on cloth imports caused the inflow of fine Indian cotton to decline. Over the nineteenth century, British manufacturers flooded the Indian market. India played a crucial role in the late-nineteenth-century world economy by helping Britain balance its deficits. Britain’s trade surplus with India also helped pay the so-called ‘home charges’ that included private remittances home by British officials and 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 fought in Europe but impacted the entire world. During this period, the world experienced widespread economic and political instability and another catastrophic war. |
Wartime Transformations
| The First World War was fought between the Allies – Britain, France, and Russia (later joined by the US)—and the Central Powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey. The war lasted for more than four years and involved the world’s leading industrial nations. It was the first modern industrial war, seeing the use of machine guns, tanks, aircraft, and chemical weapons on a massive scale. During the war, industries were restructured to produce war-related goods. Britain borrowed large sums of money from US banks and the US public, transforming the US from an international debtor to an international creditor. |
Post-War Recovery
| After the war, Britain, the world’s leading economy, faced a prolonged crisis. Industries had developed in India and Japan while Britain was preoccupied with the war. Britain, after the war, struggled to recapture its earlier dominance in the Indian market and compete with Japan internationally. At the war’s end, Britain was burdened with huge external debts. Anxiety and uncertainty about work became an enduring part of the post-war scenario. |
Rise of Mass Production and Consumption
| The US economy recovered quickly and resumed strong growth in the early 1920s. Mass production became a key feature of the US economy, starting in the late nineteenth century. Henry Ford, a well-known pioneer of mass production, established his car plant in Detroit. The T-Model Ford was the world’s first mass-produced car. Fordist industrial practices soon spread in the US and Europe in the 1920s. The demand for refrigerators, washing machines, and other goods also boomed, financed once again by loans. In 1923, the US resumed exporting capital to the rest of the world and became the largest overseas lender. |
The Great Depression
| The US economy recovered quickly and resumed strong growth in the early 1920s. Mass production became a key feature of the US economy, starting in the late nineteenth century. Henry Ford, a well-known pioneer of mass production, established his car plant in Detroit. The T-Model Ford was the world’s first mass-produced car. Fordist industrial practices soon spread in the US and Europe in the 1920s. The demand for refrigerators, washing machines, and other goods also boomed, financed once again by loans. In 1923, the US resumed exporting capital to the rest of the world and became the largest overseas lender. |
India and the Great Depression
| During the Great Depression, Indian trade suffered as agricultural prices sharply declined. Despite this, the colonial government refused to reduce revenue demands. In response to economic pressures, India turned to exporting precious metals, particularly gold. Rural India faced significant unrest, exacerbated by these economic hardships, culminating in Mahatma Gandhi launching the civil disobedience movement in 1931. |
Rebuilding a World Economy: The Post-War Era
| Two decades after World War I, World War II erupted, lasting six years and involving major powers like Nazi Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Allies (Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the US). The war caused extensive economic devastation and social disruption globally. Post-war reconstruction was shaped by the emergence of the US as the dominant economic, political, and military power in the Western world, alongside the influence of the Soviet Union. |
Also Read: NCERT Class 8 Geography Chapter 1 Resources Notes (Free PDF)
Post-War Settlement and the Bretton Woods Institutions
| Lessons from the inter-war economic experiences highlighted the importance of mass communication for sustaining mass production and a country’s economic links with the outside world. The Bretton Woods conference established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to manage member nations’ external surpluses and deficits. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, known as the World Bank, was created to finance postwar reconstruction. Both institutions began operations in 1947. |
The Early Post-War Years
| The Bretton Woods agreement ushered in an era of unprecedented trade and income growth for Western industrial nations and Japan. Technological advancements and entrepreneurial spirit spread globally during this period. |
Decolonisation and Independence
| After World War II, many parts of the world remained under European colonial rule. Initially designed to support industrial countries, the IMF and World Bank shifted their focus in the late 1950s towards developing countries. However, most developing nations did not benefit from the rapid growth experienced by Western economies in the 1950s and 1960s. This disparity led to the formation of the Group of 77 (G-77), advocating for a New International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO aimed to give developing countries greater control over their natural resources, more development assistance, fairer prices for raw materials, and improved access to developed countries’ markets. |
End of Bretton Woods and the Beginning of ‘Globalisation’
| By the 1960s, rising costs from overseas involvements weakened the US’s financial and competitive strength. The mid-1970s saw significant changes in the international financial system, coupled with rising unemployment in the industrial world. Multinational corporations (MNCs) began relocating production to low-wage countries in Asia, with China emerging as a favored destination for foreign investments. Over the past two decades, countries like India, China, and Brazil have undergone rapid economic transformations, reshaping the global economic landscape. |
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FAQs
Q.1. What are the benefits of ‘globalisation’?
Ans: Globalization brings benefits like increased trade opportunities, technological advancements, access to resources, job creation, and cultural exchange, fostering economic growth and global understanding.
Q.2. What are the different types of globalization?
Ans: Economic, cultural, political, and technological globalisation are prominent types, each impacting societies differently through trade, ideas, governance, and technology exchange.
Q.3. What are the main elements of globalisation?
Ans: Economic integration, cultural exchange, technological advancement, and political cooperation are key elements driving globalization, and reshaping economies, societies, and governance worldwide.
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