The Making of a Global World

This chapter traces the long history through which the modern global world took shape — through trade, migration, the movement of capital and even the spread of germs. It begins with the pre-modern world of the silk routes and the long-distance travel of foods like the potato and spaghetti, then shows how the sixteenth-century conquest of the Americas (aided by smallpox) and the flow of silver shifted the centre of world trade to Europe. It explains the three flows of the nineteenth-century world economy (trade, labour and capital), the effects of the Corn Laws and the rise of a global agricultural economy, the role of technology such as railways and refrigerated ships, and the darker side of late-nineteenth-century colonialism — the carving up of Africa, the rinderpest cattle plague, and indentured labour migration from India. It then follows the inter-war economy — the First World War, mass production and Henry Ford, the Great Depression and its impact on India — and the rebuilding of the post-war economy through the Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and World Bank), decolonisation, the G-77 and the beginnings of present-day globalisation. It is a key chapter of the Class 10 History (India and the Contemporary World II) Board syllabus.