About This Section
This is a collection of important questions with complete model answers covering the whole of Chapter 3 — The Making of a Global World. They are grouped by marks — 1-mark, 3-mark and 5-mark — for thorough Board preparation.
1-Mark Questions
Q1. What linked Asia with Europe and North Africa in pre-modern times? Ans. The silk routes.
Q2. Which continent did most common foods like potatoes and maize come from? Ans. The Americas.
Q3. What was the most powerful weapon of the Spanish conquest of America? Ans. The germs of smallpox.
Q4. When was indentured labour migration from India abolished? Ans. In 1921.
1-Mark Questions (continued)
Q5. Where was the conference that carved up Africa held in 1885? Ans. In Berlin.
Q6. Who pioneered mass production using the assembly line? Ans. Henry Ford.
Q7. Which two institutions are the Bretton Woods twins? Ans. The IMF and the World Bank.
Q8. What does G-77 stand for? Ans. The Group of 77 developing countries.
3-Mark Questions
Q9. Explain the three types of flows within international economic exchange. Ans. (1) The flow of trade — trade in goods such as cloth and wheat; (2) the flow of labour — the migration of people in search of work; and (3) the movement of capital — investment over long distances. All three were closely interwoven in the nineteenth-century world economy.
3-Mark Questions (continued)
Q10. Explain how the global transfer of disease helped the colonisation of the Americas. Ans. America's original inhabitants had been isolated for millions of years and had no immunity to European germs. Smallpox spread rapidly, even ahead of the Europeans, killing whole communities and decimating populations, and so paved the way for European conquest — while guns could be resisted, disease could not.
3-Mark Questions (continued)
Q11. Explain the effects of the British decision to abolish the Corn Laws. Ans. After the Corn Laws were abolished, cheaper food could be imported than grown at home. British agriculture could not compete, so land was left uncultivated and workers lost their jobs and migrated overseas; meanwhile food production expanded abroad to meet British demand.
5-Mark Questions
Q12. Describe indentured labour migration from India — its causes, destinations and conditions. Ans. Indian indentured labourers were bonded workers on five-year contracts. They came mainly from eastern UP, Bihar, central India and dry Tamil Nadu, where cottage industries had declined and rents risen. They went to the Caribbean (Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam), Mauritius and Fiji. Recruited through deception, they faced harsh conditions and few rights — a 'new system of slavery' — but created new cultural forms (Hosay, Chutney music). The system was abolished in 1921.
5-Mark Questions (continued)
Q13. Explain the causes of the Great Depression. Ans. (1) Agricultural overproduction and falling prices — farmers produced more to keep incomes up, worsening the glut; (2) many countries had financed investment with US loans, and when US lenders panicked and withdrew loans, dependent countries faced crisis; (3) US bank failures (over 4,000 by 1933) and the doubling of US import duties deepened and spread the slump worldwide.
Q14. What was the Bretton Woods system and what were its main features? Ans. The Bretton Woods system was the post-war international economic order agreed in July 1944. It set up the IMF (to manage surpluses and deficits) and the World Bank (for reconstruction), both controlled by the Western powers. It was based on fixed exchange rates, with currencies pegged to the dollar and the dollar to gold, and it brought decades of stable growth until it collapsed in the 1970s.