NCERT Textbook - The making of Global World | Social Studies (SST) Class 10 PDF Download

 Page 1


77
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
1  The Pre-modern World
When we talk of ‘globalisation’ we often refer to an economic
system that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you will
see in this chapter, the making of the global world has a long
history – of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, the
movement of capital, and much else. As we think about the dramatic
and visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today,
we need to understand the phases through which this world in
which we live has emerged.
All through history, human societies have become steadily more
interlinked. From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests and
pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity and
spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. They carried goods,
money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases.
As early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valley
civilisations with present-day W est Asia. For more than a millennia,
cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a form of currency)
from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa. The
long-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced as
far back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had
become an unmistakable link.
The Making of a Global World
Chapter IV
The Making of a Global World
Fig. 1 – Image of a ship on a memorial stone,
Goa Museum, tenth century CE.
From the ninth century, images of ships
appear regularly in memorial stones found in
the western coast, indicating the significance
of oceanic trade.
Page 2


77
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
1  The Pre-modern World
When we talk of ‘globalisation’ we often refer to an economic
system that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you will
see in this chapter, the making of the global world has a long
history – of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, the
movement of capital, and much else. As we think about the dramatic
and visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today,
we need to understand the phases through which this world in
which we live has emerged.
All through history, human societies have become steadily more
interlinked. From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests and
pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity and
spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. They carried goods,
money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases.
As early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valley
civilisations with present-day W est Asia. For more than a millennia,
cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a form of currency)
from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa. The
long-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced as
far back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had
become an unmistakable link.
The Making of a Global World
Chapter IV
The Making of a Global World
Fig. 1 – Image of a ship on a memorial stone,
Goa Museum, tenth century CE.
From the ninth century, images of ships
appear regularly in memorial stones found in
the western coast, indicating the significance
of oceanic trade.
India and the Contemporary World
78
1.1 Silk Routes Link the World
The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade
and cultural links between distant parts of the world. The name ‘silk
routes’ points to the importance of W est-bound Chinese silk cargoes
along this route. Historians have identified several silk routes, over
land and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linking
Asia with Europe and northern Africa. They are known to have
existed since before the Christian Era and thrived almost till the
fifteenth century. But Chinese pottery also travelled the same route,
as did textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return,
precious metals – gold and silver – flowed from Europe to Asia.
Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. Early
Christian missionaries almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, as
did early Muslim preachers a few centuries later. Much before all
this, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and spread in several
directions through intersecting points on the silk routes.
1.2 Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato
Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange.
Traders and travellers introduced new crops to the lands they
travelled. Even ‘ready’ foodstuff  in distant parts of the world might
share common origins. Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believed
that noodles travelled west from China to
become spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traders
took pasta to fifth-century Sicily , an island now
in Italy . Similar foods were also known in India
and Japan, so the truth about their origins may
never be known. Y et such guesswork suggests
the possibilities of long-distance cultural contact
even in the pre-modern world.
Many of our common foods such as potatoes,
soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies,
sweet potatoes, and so on were not known to
our ancestors until about five centuries ago.
These foods were only introduced in Europe
and Asia after Christopher Columbus
accidentally discovered the vast continent that
would later become known as the Americas.
Fig. 3 – Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods,
from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels, fifteenth century.
Fig. 2 – Silk route trade as depicted in a
Chinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave
217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu, China.
Page 3


77
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
1  The Pre-modern World
When we talk of ‘globalisation’ we often refer to an economic
system that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you will
see in this chapter, the making of the global world has a long
history – of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, the
movement of capital, and much else. As we think about the dramatic
and visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today,
we need to understand the phases through which this world in
which we live has emerged.
All through history, human societies have become steadily more
interlinked. From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests and
pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity and
spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. They carried goods,
money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases.
As early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valley
civilisations with present-day W est Asia. For more than a millennia,
cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a form of currency)
from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa. The
long-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced as
far back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had
become an unmistakable link.
The Making of a Global World
Chapter IV
The Making of a Global World
Fig. 1 – Image of a ship on a memorial stone,
Goa Museum, tenth century CE.
From the ninth century, images of ships
appear regularly in memorial stones found in
the western coast, indicating the significance
of oceanic trade.
India and the Contemporary World
78
1.1 Silk Routes Link the World
The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade
and cultural links between distant parts of the world. The name ‘silk
routes’ points to the importance of W est-bound Chinese silk cargoes
along this route. Historians have identified several silk routes, over
land and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linking
Asia with Europe and northern Africa. They are known to have
existed since before the Christian Era and thrived almost till the
fifteenth century. But Chinese pottery also travelled the same route,
as did textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return,
precious metals – gold and silver – flowed from Europe to Asia.
Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. Early
Christian missionaries almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, as
did early Muslim preachers a few centuries later. Much before all
this, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and spread in several
directions through intersecting points on the silk routes.
1.2 Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato
Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange.
Traders and travellers introduced new crops to the lands they
travelled. Even ‘ready’ foodstuff  in distant parts of the world might
share common origins. Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believed
that noodles travelled west from China to
become spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traders
took pasta to fifth-century Sicily , an island now
in Italy . Similar foods were also known in India
and Japan, so the truth about their origins may
never be known. Y et such guesswork suggests
the possibilities of long-distance cultural contact
even in the pre-modern world.
Many of our common foods such as potatoes,
soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies,
sweet potatoes, and so on were not known to
our ancestors until about five centuries ago.
These foods were only introduced in Europe
and Asia after Christopher Columbus
accidentally discovered the vast continent that
would later become known as the Americas.
Fig. 3 – Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods,
from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels, fifteenth century.
Fig. 2 – Silk route trade as depicted in a
Chinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave
217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu, China.
79
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
(Here we will use ‘America’ to describe North America, South
America and the Caribbean.) In fact, many of our common foods
came from America’s original inhabitants – the American Indians.
Sometimes the new crops could make the difference between life
and death. Europe’s poor began to eat better and live longer with
the introduction of the humble potato. Ireland’s poorest peasants
became so dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed the
potato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands died
of starvation.
1.3 Conquest, Disease and Trade
The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after
European sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfully
crossed the western ocean to America. For centuries before, the
Indian Ocean had known a bustling trade, with goods, people,
knowledge, customs, etc. criss-crossing its waters. The Indian
subcontinent was central to these flows and a crucial point in their
networks.  The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirect
some of these flows towards Europe.
Before its ‘discovery’, America had been cut off from regular contact
with the rest of the world for millions of years. But from the sixteenth
century, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to
transform trade and lives everywhere.
Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present-
day Peru and Mexico also enhanced Europe’s wealth and financed
its trade with Asia. Legends spread in seventeenth-century Europe
about South America’s fabled wealth. Many expeditions set off in
search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold.
The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of America
was decisively under way by the mid-sixteenth century.  European
conquest was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, the
most powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors was not a
conventional military weapon at all. It was the germs such as those
of smallpox that they carried on their person. Because of their long
isolation, America’s original inhabitants had no immunity against
these diseases that came from Europe. Smallpox in particular proved
a deadly killer. Once introduced, it spread deep into the continent,
ahead even of any Europeans reaching there. It killed and decimated
whole communities, paving the way for conquest.
Fig. 4 –  The Irish Potato Famine, Illustrated
London News, 1849.
Hungry children digging for potatoes in a field that
has already been harvested, hoping to discover
some leftovers. During the Great Irish Potato
Famine (1845 to 1849), around 1,000,000
people died of starvation in Ireland, and double the
number emigrated in search of work.
‘Biological’ warfare?
John Winthorp, the first governor of  the
Massachusetts Bay colony in New England,
wrote in May 1634 that smallpox signalled God’s
blessing for the colonists: ‘… the natives … were
neere (near) all dead of small Poxe (pox), so as
the Lord hathe (had) cleared our title to what
we possess’.
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
Box 1
Page 4


77
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
1  The Pre-modern World
When we talk of ‘globalisation’ we often refer to an economic
system that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you will
see in this chapter, the making of the global world has a long
history – of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, the
movement of capital, and much else. As we think about the dramatic
and visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today,
we need to understand the phases through which this world in
which we live has emerged.
All through history, human societies have become steadily more
interlinked. From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests and
pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity and
spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. They carried goods,
money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases.
As early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valley
civilisations with present-day W est Asia. For more than a millennia,
cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a form of currency)
from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa. The
long-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced as
far back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had
become an unmistakable link.
The Making of a Global World
Chapter IV
The Making of a Global World
Fig. 1 – Image of a ship on a memorial stone,
Goa Museum, tenth century CE.
From the ninth century, images of ships
appear regularly in memorial stones found in
the western coast, indicating the significance
of oceanic trade.
India and the Contemporary World
78
1.1 Silk Routes Link the World
The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade
and cultural links between distant parts of the world. The name ‘silk
routes’ points to the importance of W est-bound Chinese silk cargoes
along this route. Historians have identified several silk routes, over
land and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linking
Asia with Europe and northern Africa. They are known to have
existed since before the Christian Era and thrived almost till the
fifteenth century. But Chinese pottery also travelled the same route,
as did textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return,
precious metals – gold and silver – flowed from Europe to Asia.
Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. Early
Christian missionaries almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, as
did early Muslim preachers a few centuries later. Much before all
this, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and spread in several
directions through intersecting points on the silk routes.
1.2 Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato
Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange.
Traders and travellers introduced new crops to the lands they
travelled. Even ‘ready’ foodstuff  in distant parts of the world might
share common origins. Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believed
that noodles travelled west from China to
become spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traders
took pasta to fifth-century Sicily , an island now
in Italy . Similar foods were also known in India
and Japan, so the truth about their origins may
never be known. Y et such guesswork suggests
the possibilities of long-distance cultural contact
even in the pre-modern world.
Many of our common foods such as potatoes,
soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies,
sweet potatoes, and so on were not known to
our ancestors until about five centuries ago.
These foods were only introduced in Europe
and Asia after Christopher Columbus
accidentally discovered the vast continent that
would later become known as the Americas.
Fig. 3 – Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods,
from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels, fifteenth century.
Fig. 2 – Silk route trade as depicted in a
Chinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave
217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu, China.
79
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
(Here we will use ‘America’ to describe North America, South
America and the Caribbean.) In fact, many of our common foods
came from America’s original inhabitants – the American Indians.
Sometimes the new crops could make the difference between life
and death. Europe’s poor began to eat better and live longer with
the introduction of the humble potato. Ireland’s poorest peasants
became so dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed the
potato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands died
of starvation.
1.3 Conquest, Disease and Trade
The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after
European sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfully
crossed the western ocean to America. For centuries before, the
Indian Ocean had known a bustling trade, with goods, people,
knowledge, customs, etc. criss-crossing its waters. The Indian
subcontinent was central to these flows and a crucial point in their
networks.  The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirect
some of these flows towards Europe.
Before its ‘discovery’, America had been cut off from regular contact
with the rest of the world for millions of years. But from the sixteenth
century, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to
transform trade and lives everywhere.
Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present-
day Peru and Mexico also enhanced Europe’s wealth and financed
its trade with Asia. Legends spread in seventeenth-century Europe
about South America’s fabled wealth. Many expeditions set off in
search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold.
The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of America
was decisively under way by the mid-sixteenth century.  European
conquest was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, the
most powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors was not a
conventional military weapon at all. It was the germs such as those
of smallpox that they carried on their person. Because of their long
isolation, America’s original inhabitants had no immunity against
these diseases that came from Europe. Smallpox in particular proved
a deadly killer. Once introduced, it spread deep into the continent,
ahead even of any Europeans reaching there. It killed and decimated
whole communities, paving the way for conquest.
Fig. 4 –  The Irish Potato Famine, Illustrated
London News, 1849.
Hungry children digging for potatoes in a field that
has already been harvested, hoping to discover
some leftovers. During the Great Irish Potato
Famine (1845 to 1849), around 1,000,000
people died of starvation in Ireland, and double the
number emigrated in search of work.
‘Biological’ warfare?
John Winthorp, the first governor of  the
Massachusetts Bay colony in New England,
wrote in May 1634 that smallpox signalled God’s
blessing for the colonists: ‘… the natives … were
neere (near) all dead of small Poxe (pox), so as
the Lord hathe (had) cleared our title to what
we possess’.
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
Box 1
India and the Contemporary World
80
Explain what we mean when we say that the
world ‘shrank’ in the 1500s.
Discuss
Guns could be bought or captured and turned against the invaders.
But not diseases such as smallpox to which the conquerors were
mostly immune.
Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in
Europe. Cities were crowded and deadly diseases were widespread.
Religious conflicts were common, and religious dissenters were
persecuted. Thousands therefore fled Europe for America. Here,
by the eighteenth century, plantations worked by slaves captured
in Africa were growing cotton and sugar for European markets.
Until well into the eighteenth century , China and India were among
the world’s richest countries. They were also pre-eminent in Asian
trade. However, from the fifteenth century, China is said to have
restricted overseas contacts and retreated into isolation.  China’s
reduced role and the rising importance of the Americas gradually
moved the centre of world trade westwards. Europe now emerged
as the centre of  world trade.
New words
Dissenter – One who refuses to accept
established beliefs and practices
Fig. 5 – Slaves for sale, New Orleans, Illustrated London News, 1851.
A prospective buyer carefully inspecting slaves lined up before the auction. You can see two
children along with four women and seven men in top hats and suit waiting to be sold. To attract
buyers, slaves were often dressed in their best clothes.
Page 5


77
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
1  The Pre-modern World
When we talk of ‘globalisation’ we often refer to an economic
system that has emerged since the last 50 years or so. But as you will
see in this chapter, the making of the global world has a long
history – of trade, of migration, of people in search of work, the
movement of capital, and much else. As we think about the dramatic
and visible signs of global interconnectedness in our lives today,
we need to understand the phases through which this world in
which we live has emerged.
All through history, human societies have become steadily more
interlinked. From ancient times, travellers, traders, priests and
pilgrims travelled vast distances for knowledge, opportunity and
spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. They carried goods,
money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases.
As early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valley
civilisations with present-day W est Asia. For more than a millennia,
cowries (the Hindi cowdi or seashells, used as a form of currency)
from the Maldives found their way to China and East Africa. The
long-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced as
far back as the seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had
become an unmistakable link.
The Making of a Global World
Chapter IV
The Making of a Global World
Fig. 1 – Image of a ship on a memorial stone,
Goa Museum, tenth century CE.
From the ninth century, images of ships
appear regularly in memorial stones found in
the western coast, indicating the significance
of oceanic trade.
India and the Contemporary World
78
1.1 Silk Routes Link the World
The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade
and cultural links between distant parts of the world. The name ‘silk
routes’ points to the importance of W est-bound Chinese silk cargoes
along this route. Historians have identified several silk routes, over
land and by sea, knitting together vast regions of Asia, and linking
Asia with Europe and northern Africa. They are known to have
existed since before the Christian Era and thrived almost till the
fifteenth century. But Chinese pottery also travelled the same route,
as did textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return,
precious metals – gold and silver – flowed from Europe to Asia.
Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. Early
Christian missionaries almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, as
did early Muslim preachers a few centuries later. Much before all
this, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and spread in several
directions through intersecting points on the silk routes.
1.2 Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato
Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange.
Traders and travellers introduced new crops to the lands they
travelled. Even ‘ready’ foodstuff  in distant parts of the world might
share common origins. Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believed
that noodles travelled west from China to
become spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traders
took pasta to fifth-century Sicily , an island now
in Italy . Similar foods were also known in India
and Japan, so the truth about their origins may
never be known. Y et such guesswork suggests
the possibilities of long-distance cultural contact
even in the pre-modern world.
Many of our common foods such as potatoes,
soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies,
sweet potatoes, and so on were not known to
our ancestors until about five centuries ago.
These foods were only introduced in Europe
and Asia after Christopher Columbus
accidentally discovered the vast continent that
would later become known as the Americas.
Fig. 3 – Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods,
from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels, fifteenth century.
Fig. 2 – Silk route trade as depicted in a
Chinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave
217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu, China.
79
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
(Here we will use ‘America’ to describe North America, South
America and the Caribbean.) In fact, many of our common foods
came from America’s original inhabitants – the American Indians.
Sometimes the new crops could make the difference between life
and death. Europe’s poor began to eat better and live longer with
the introduction of the humble potato. Ireland’s poorest peasants
became so dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed the
potato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands died
of starvation.
1.3 Conquest, Disease and Trade
The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after
European sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfully
crossed the western ocean to America. For centuries before, the
Indian Ocean had known a bustling trade, with goods, people,
knowledge, customs, etc. criss-crossing its waters. The Indian
subcontinent was central to these flows and a crucial point in their
networks.  The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirect
some of these flows towards Europe.
Before its ‘discovery’, America had been cut off from regular contact
with the rest of the world for millions of years. But from the sixteenth
century, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to
transform trade and lives everywhere.
Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present-
day Peru and Mexico also enhanced Europe’s wealth and financed
its trade with Asia. Legends spread in seventeenth-century Europe
about South America’s fabled wealth. Many expeditions set off in
search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold.
The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of America
was decisively under way by the mid-sixteenth century.  European
conquest was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, the
most powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors was not a
conventional military weapon at all. It was the germs such as those
of smallpox that they carried on their person. Because of their long
isolation, America’s original inhabitants had no immunity against
these diseases that came from Europe. Smallpox in particular proved
a deadly killer. Once introduced, it spread deep into the continent,
ahead even of any Europeans reaching there. It killed and decimated
whole communities, paving the way for conquest.
Fig. 4 –  The Irish Potato Famine, Illustrated
London News, 1849.
Hungry children digging for potatoes in a field that
has already been harvested, hoping to discover
some leftovers. During the Great Irish Potato
Famine (1845 to 1849), around 1,000,000
people died of starvation in Ireland, and double the
number emigrated in search of work.
‘Biological’ warfare?
John Winthorp, the first governor of  the
Massachusetts Bay colony in New England,
wrote in May 1634 that smallpox signalled God’s
blessing for the colonists: ‘… the natives … were
neere (near) all dead of small Poxe (pox), so as
the Lord hathe (had) cleared our title to what
we possess’.
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
Box 1
India and the Contemporary World
80
Explain what we mean when we say that the
world ‘shrank’ in the 1500s.
Discuss
Guns could be bought or captured and turned against the invaders.
But not diseases such as smallpox to which the conquerors were
mostly immune.
Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in
Europe. Cities were crowded and deadly diseases were widespread.
Religious conflicts were common, and religious dissenters were
persecuted. Thousands therefore fled Europe for America. Here,
by the eighteenth century, plantations worked by slaves captured
in Africa were growing cotton and sugar for European markets.
Until well into the eighteenth century , China and India were among
the world’s richest countries. They were also pre-eminent in Asian
trade. However, from the fifteenth century, China is said to have
restricted overseas contacts and retreated into isolation.  China’s
reduced role and the rising importance of the Americas gradually
moved the centre of world trade westwards. Europe now emerged
as the centre of  world trade.
New words
Dissenter – One who refuses to accept
established beliefs and practices
Fig. 5 – Slaves for sale, New Orleans, Illustrated London News, 1851.
A prospective buyer carefully inspecting slaves lined up before the auction. You can see two
children along with four women and seven men in top hats and suit waiting to be sold. To attract
buyers, slaves were often dressed in their best clothes.
81
The  Making  of  a  Global  World
The world changed profoundly in the nineteenth century . Economic,
political, social, cultural and technological factors interacted in
complex ways to transform societies and reshape external relations.
Economists identify three types of movement or ‘flows’ within
international economic exchanges. The first is the flow of trade which
in the nineteenth century referred largely to trade in goods (e.g.,
cloth or wheat). The second is the flow of labour – the migration
of people in search of employment. The third is the movement of
capital for short-term or long-term investments over long distances.
All three flows were closely interwoven and affected peoples’ lives
more deeply now than ever before. The interconnections could
sometimes be broken – for example, labour migration was often
more restricted than goods or capital flows. Y et it helps us understand
the nineteenth-century world economy better if we look at the
three flows together.
2.1 A World Economy Takes Shape
A good place to start is the changing pattern of food production
and consumption in industrial Europe. Traditionally , countries liked
to be self-sufficient in food. But in nineteenth-century Britain,
self-sufficiency in food meant lower living standards and social
conflict. Why was this so?
Population growth from the late eighteenth century had increased
the demand for food grains in Britain. As urban centres expanded
and industry grew, the demand for agricultural products went
up, pushing up food grain prices. Under pressure from landed
groups, the government also restricted the import of corn. The
laws allowing the government to do this were commonly known as
the ‘Corn Laws’. Unhappy with high food prices, industrialists and
urban dwellers forced the abolition of the Corn Laws.
After the Corn Laws were scrapped, food could be imported into
Britain more cheaply than it could be produced within the country .
British agriculture was unable to compete with imports.  Vast areas
of land were now left uncultivated, and thousands of men and
women were thrown out of work. They flocked to the cities or
migrated overseas.
2  The Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)