NCERT Textbook - Displacing Indigenous Peoples | Old & New NCERTs for IAS Preparation (Must Read) - UPSC PDF Download

 Page 1


  123
iv
Displacing Indigenous Peoples
  Paths to Modernisation
      TOWARDS Modernisation
2024-25
Page 2


  123
iv
Displacing Indigenous Peoples
  Paths to Modernisation
      TOWARDS Modernisation
2024-25
124  THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY
Linking the world –
In 1927 Charles
Lindbergh, twenty-five
years old, flew across
the Atlantic Ocean,
from New York to
Paris, in a single-
engine aeroplane.
TOWARDS Modernisation
I
N the previous section you have learnt about certain crucial
developments in the medieval and early modern world –
feudalism, the European ‘Renaissance’ and the encounters
between Europeans and the peoples of the Asia, Africa and
Americas. As you would have realised, some of the phenomena
that contributed to the making of our modern world gradually
evolved in this period, and especially so from the mid-fifteenth
century onwards. Two further developments in world history
created a context for what has been called ‘modernisation’. These
were the Industrial Revolution and a series of political revolutions
that transformed subjects into citizens, beginning with the
American Revolution (1776-81) and the French Revolution
(1789-94).
Britain has been the world’s first industrial nation. For long
it was believed that British industrialisation provided the model
for industrialisation in other countries. However, historians
have begun to question some of the earlier ideas about the
Industrial Revolution. Each country drew upon the experiences
of other nations, without necessarily reproducing any model.
In Britain, for instance, coal and cotton textile industries were
developed in the first phase of industrialisation, while the
invention of railways initiated the second stage of that process.
In other countries such as Russia, which began to industrialise
much later (from the late nineteenth century onwards), the
railway and other heavy industry emerged in the initial phase
of industrialisation itself. Likewise, the role of the state, and
of banks, in industrialisation has differed from country to
country. The British case, no doubt, influenced the industrial
2024-25
Page 3


  123
iv
Displacing Indigenous Peoples
  Paths to Modernisation
      TOWARDS Modernisation
2024-25
124  THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY
Linking the world –
In 1927 Charles
Lindbergh, twenty-five
years old, flew across
the Atlantic Ocean,
from New York to
Paris, in a single-
engine aeroplane.
TOWARDS Modernisation
I
N the previous section you have learnt about certain crucial
developments in the medieval and early modern world –
feudalism, the European ‘Renaissance’ and the encounters
between Europeans and the peoples of the Asia, Africa and
Americas. As you would have realised, some of the phenomena
that contributed to the making of our modern world gradually
evolved in this period, and especially so from the mid-fifteenth
century onwards. Two further developments in world history
created a context for what has been called ‘modernisation’. These
were the Industrial Revolution and a series of political revolutions
that transformed subjects into citizens, beginning with the
American Revolution (1776-81) and the French Revolution
(1789-94).
Britain has been the world’s first industrial nation. For long
it was believed that British industrialisation provided the model
for industrialisation in other countries. However, historians
have begun to question some of the earlier ideas about the
Industrial Revolution. Each country drew upon the experiences
of other nations, without necessarily reproducing any model.
In Britain, for instance, coal and cotton textile industries were
developed in the first phase of industrialisation, while the
invention of railways initiated the second stage of that process.
In other countries such as Russia, which began to industrialise
much later (from the late nineteenth century onwards), the
railway and other heavy industry emerged in the initial phase
of industrialisation itself. Likewise, the role of the state, and
of banks, in industrialisation has differed from country to
country. The British case, no doubt, influenced the industrial
2024-25
  125
trajectories of other nations such as the USA and Germany,
two significant industrial powers. It also displayed the human
and material costs incurred by Britain on its industrialisation
– the plight of the labouring poor, especially of children,
environmental degradation and the consequent epidemics of
cholera and tuberculosis. In Theme 7 you will read how
industrial pollution and cadmium and mercury poisoning in
Japan stirred people into mass movements against
indiscriminate industrialisation.
European powers began to colonise parts of America and
Asia and South Africa well before the Industrial Revolution.
Theme 6 tells you the story of what European settlers did to
the native peoples of America and Australia. The bourgeois
mentality of the settlers made them buy and sell everything,
including land and water. But the natives, who appeared
uncivilised to European Americans, asked, ‘If you do not own
the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can
one buy them?’ The natives did not feel the need to own land,
fish or animals. They had no desire to commodify them; if
things needed to be exchanged, they could simply be gifted.
Quite obviously, the natives and the Europeans represented
competing notions of civilisation. The former did not allow
the European deluge to wipe out their cultures although the
US and Canadian governments of the mid-twentieth century
desired natives to ‘join the mainstream’ and the Australian
authorities of the same period attempted to simply ignore their
traditions and culture. One might wonder what is meant by
‘mainstream’. How does economic and political power
influence the making of ‘mainstream cultures’?
Western capitalisms – mercantile, industrial and financial
– and early twentieth-century Japanese capitalism created
colonies in large parts of the third world. Some of these were
settler colonies. Others, such as British rule in India, are
examples of direct imperial control. The case of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century China illustrates a third variant
of imperialism. Here Britain, France, Germany, Russia,
America and Japan meddled in Chinese affairs without
directly taking over state power. They exploited the country’s
resources to their own advantage, seriously compromising
Chinese sovereignty and reducing the country to the status
of a semi-colony.
Almost everywhere, colonial exploitation was challenged by
powerful nationalist movements. Nationalisms, however, also
arose without a colonial context, as in the West or Japan. All
TOWARDS MODERNISATION
Linking the world –
J. Lipchitz’s Figure,
sculpted in the 1920s,
shows the influence of
central African
statuary.
Linking the world –
Japanese Zen
paintings like this one
were admired by
western artists, and
influenced the
‘Abstract
Expressionist’ style of
painting in the 1920s
in the USA.
2024-25
Page 4


  123
iv
Displacing Indigenous Peoples
  Paths to Modernisation
      TOWARDS Modernisation
2024-25
124  THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY
Linking the world –
In 1927 Charles
Lindbergh, twenty-five
years old, flew across
the Atlantic Ocean,
from New York to
Paris, in a single-
engine aeroplane.
TOWARDS Modernisation
I
N the previous section you have learnt about certain crucial
developments in the medieval and early modern world –
feudalism, the European ‘Renaissance’ and the encounters
between Europeans and the peoples of the Asia, Africa and
Americas. As you would have realised, some of the phenomena
that contributed to the making of our modern world gradually
evolved in this period, and especially so from the mid-fifteenth
century onwards. Two further developments in world history
created a context for what has been called ‘modernisation’. These
were the Industrial Revolution and a series of political revolutions
that transformed subjects into citizens, beginning with the
American Revolution (1776-81) and the French Revolution
(1789-94).
Britain has been the world’s first industrial nation. For long
it was believed that British industrialisation provided the model
for industrialisation in other countries. However, historians
have begun to question some of the earlier ideas about the
Industrial Revolution. Each country drew upon the experiences
of other nations, without necessarily reproducing any model.
In Britain, for instance, coal and cotton textile industries were
developed in the first phase of industrialisation, while the
invention of railways initiated the second stage of that process.
In other countries such as Russia, which began to industrialise
much later (from the late nineteenth century onwards), the
railway and other heavy industry emerged in the initial phase
of industrialisation itself. Likewise, the role of the state, and
of banks, in industrialisation has differed from country to
country. The British case, no doubt, influenced the industrial
2024-25
  125
trajectories of other nations such as the USA and Germany,
two significant industrial powers. It also displayed the human
and material costs incurred by Britain on its industrialisation
– the plight of the labouring poor, especially of children,
environmental degradation and the consequent epidemics of
cholera and tuberculosis. In Theme 7 you will read how
industrial pollution and cadmium and mercury poisoning in
Japan stirred people into mass movements against
indiscriminate industrialisation.
European powers began to colonise parts of America and
Asia and South Africa well before the Industrial Revolution.
Theme 6 tells you the story of what European settlers did to
the native peoples of America and Australia. The bourgeois
mentality of the settlers made them buy and sell everything,
including land and water. But the natives, who appeared
uncivilised to European Americans, asked, ‘If you do not own
the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can
one buy them?’ The natives did not feel the need to own land,
fish or animals. They had no desire to commodify them; if
things needed to be exchanged, they could simply be gifted.
Quite obviously, the natives and the Europeans represented
competing notions of civilisation. The former did not allow
the European deluge to wipe out their cultures although the
US and Canadian governments of the mid-twentieth century
desired natives to ‘join the mainstream’ and the Australian
authorities of the same period attempted to simply ignore their
traditions and culture. One might wonder what is meant by
‘mainstream’. How does economic and political power
influence the making of ‘mainstream cultures’?
Western capitalisms – mercantile, industrial and financial
– and early twentieth-century Japanese capitalism created
colonies in large parts of the third world. Some of these were
settler colonies. Others, such as British rule in India, are
examples of direct imperial control. The case of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century China illustrates a third variant
of imperialism. Here Britain, France, Germany, Russia,
America and Japan meddled in Chinese affairs without
directly taking over state power. They exploited the country’s
resources to their own advantage, seriously compromising
Chinese sovereignty and reducing the country to the status
of a semi-colony.
Almost everywhere, colonial exploitation was challenged by
powerful nationalist movements. Nationalisms, however, also
arose without a colonial context, as in the West or Japan. All
TOWARDS MODERNISATION
Linking the world –
J. Lipchitz’s Figure,
sculpted in the 1920s,
shows the influence of
central African
statuary.
Linking the world –
Japanese Zen
paintings like this one
were admired by
western artists, and
influenced the
‘Abstract
Expressionist’ style of
painting in the 1920s
in the USA.
2024-25
126  THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY
nationalisms are doctrines of popular sovereignty. Nationalist
movements believe that political power should rest with the
people and this is what makes nationalism a modern concept.
Civic nationalism vests sovereignty in all people regardless of
language, ethnicity, religion or gender. It seeks to create a
community of rights-exercising citizens and defines nationhood
in terms of citizenship, not ethnicity or religion. Ethnic and
religious nationalisms try to build national solidarities around
a given language, religion or set of traditions, defining the
people ethnically, not in terms of common citizenship. In a
multi-ethnic country, ethnic nationalists might limit the
exercise of sovereignty to a chosen people, often assumed to
be superior to minority communities. Today, most western
countries define their nationhood in terms of common
citizenship and not by common ethnicity. One prominent
exception is Germany where ideas of ethnic nationalism have
had a long and troubling career going back to the reaction
against the French imperial occupation of German states in
1806. Ideologies of civic nationalism have vied with those of
ethnic/religious nationalism the world over and this has been
so in modern India, China and Japan as well.
As with industrialisation, so with paths to modernisation.
Different societies have evolved their distinctive modernities.
The Japanese and Chinese cases, along with the stories of
Taiwan and South Korea, are very instructive in this regard.
Japan succeeded in remaining free of colonial control and
achieved fairly rapid economic and industrial progress
throughout the twentieth century. The rebuilding of the
Japanese economy after a humiliating defeat in the Second
World War should not be seen as a mere post-war miracle. As
Theme 7 shows, it resulted from certain gains that had already
been accomplished in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Did you know, for instance, that by 1910 tuition
fees for studying at a primary school had more or less ended
and enrolment had become universal? Japan’s path to
modernisation, like that of any other country, has had its
own tensions: those between democracy and militarism,
ethnic nationalism and civic nation-building and between what
many Japanese describe as ‘tradition’ and ‘westernisation’.
The Chinese resisted colonial exploitation and their own
bureaucratic landed elite through a combination of peasant
rebellion, reform and revolution. By the early 1930s, the
Chinese Communist Party, which drew its strength from
2024-25
Page 5


  123
iv
Displacing Indigenous Peoples
  Paths to Modernisation
      TOWARDS Modernisation
2024-25
124  THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY
Linking the world –
In 1927 Charles
Lindbergh, twenty-five
years old, flew across
the Atlantic Ocean,
from New York to
Paris, in a single-
engine aeroplane.
TOWARDS Modernisation
I
N the previous section you have learnt about certain crucial
developments in the medieval and early modern world –
feudalism, the European ‘Renaissance’ and the encounters
between Europeans and the peoples of the Asia, Africa and
Americas. As you would have realised, some of the phenomena
that contributed to the making of our modern world gradually
evolved in this period, and especially so from the mid-fifteenth
century onwards. Two further developments in world history
created a context for what has been called ‘modernisation’. These
were the Industrial Revolution and a series of political revolutions
that transformed subjects into citizens, beginning with the
American Revolution (1776-81) and the French Revolution
(1789-94).
Britain has been the world’s first industrial nation. For long
it was believed that British industrialisation provided the model
for industrialisation in other countries. However, historians
have begun to question some of the earlier ideas about the
Industrial Revolution. Each country drew upon the experiences
of other nations, without necessarily reproducing any model.
In Britain, for instance, coal and cotton textile industries were
developed in the first phase of industrialisation, while the
invention of railways initiated the second stage of that process.
In other countries such as Russia, which began to industrialise
much later (from the late nineteenth century onwards), the
railway and other heavy industry emerged in the initial phase
of industrialisation itself. Likewise, the role of the state, and
of banks, in industrialisation has differed from country to
country. The British case, no doubt, influenced the industrial
2024-25
  125
trajectories of other nations such as the USA and Germany,
two significant industrial powers. It also displayed the human
and material costs incurred by Britain on its industrialisation
– the plight of the labouring poor, especially of children,
environmental degradation and the consequent epidemics of
cholera and tuberculosis. In Theme 7 you will read how
industrial pollution and cadmium and mercury poisoning in
Japan stirred people into mass movements against
indiscriminate industrialisation.
European powers began to colonise parts of America and
Asia and South Africa well before the Industrial Revolution.
Theme 6 tells you the story of what European settlers did to
the native peoples of America and Australia. The bourgeois
mentality of the settlers made them buy and sell everything,
including land and water. But the natives, who appeared
uncivilised to European Americans, asked, ‘If you do not own
the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can
one buy them?’ The natives did not feel the need to own land,
fish or animals. They had no desire to commodify them; if
things needed to be exchanged, they could simply be gifted.
Quite obviously, the natives and the Europeans represented
competing notions of civilisation. The former did not allow
the European deluge to wipe out their cultures although the
US and Canadian governments of the mid-twentieth century
desired natives to ‘join the mainstream’ and the Australian
authorities of the same period attempted to simply ignore their
traditions and culture. One might wonder what is meant by
‘mainstream’. How does economic and political power
influence the making of ‘mainstream cultures’?
Western capitalisms – mercantile, industrial and financial
– and early twentieth-century Japanese capitalism created
colonies in large parts of the third world. Some of these were
settler colonies. Others, such as British rule in India, are
examples of direct imperial control. The case of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century China illustrates a third variant
of imperialism. Here Britain, France, Germany, Russia,
America and Japan meddled in Chinese affairs without
directly taking over state power. They exploited the country’s
resources to their own advantage, seriously compromising
Chinese sovereignty and reducing the country to the status
of a semi-colony.
Almost everywhere, colonial exploitation was challenged by
powerful nationalist movements. Nationalisms, however, also
arose without a colonial context, as in the West or Japan. All
TOWARDS MODERNISATION
Linking the world –
J. Lipchitz’s Figure,
sculpted in the 1920s,
shows the influence of
central African
statuary.
Linking the world –
Japanese Zen
paintings like this one
were admired by
western artists, and
influenced the
‘Abstract
Expressionist’ style of
painting in the 1920s
in the USA.
2024-25
126  THEMES IN WORLD HISTORY
nationalisms are doctrines of popular sovereignty. Nationalist
movements believe that political power should rest with the
people and this is what makes nationalism a modern concept.
Civic nationalism vests sovereignty in all people regardless of
language, ethnicity, religion or gender. It seeks to create a
community of rights-exercising citizens and defines nationhood
in terms of citizenship, not ethnicity or religion. Ethnic and
religious nationalisms try to build national solidarities around
a given language, religion or set of traditions, defining the
people ethnically, not in terms of common citizenship. In a
multi-ethnic country, ethnic nationalists might limit the
exercise of sovereignty to a chosen people, often assumed to
be superior to minority communities. Today, most western
countries define their nationhood in terms of common
citizenship and not by common ethnicity. One prominent
exception is Germany where ideas of ethnic nationalism have
had a long and troubling career going back to the reaction
against the French imperial occupation of German states in
1806. Ideologies of civic nationalism have vied with those of
ethnic/religious nationalism the world over and this has been
so in modern India, China and Japan as well.
As with industrialisation, so with paths to modernisation.
Different societies have evolved their distinctive modernities.
The Japanese and Chinese cases, along with the stories of
Taiwan and South Korea, are very instructive in this regard.
Japan succeeded in remaining free of colonial control and
achieved fairly rapid economic and industrial progress
throughout the twentieth century. The rebuilding of the
Japanese economy after a humiliating defeat in the Second
World War should not be seen as a mere post-war miracle. As
Theme 7 shows, it resulted from certain gains that had already
been accomplished in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Did you know, for instance, that by 1910 tuition
fees for studying at a primary school had more or less ended
and enrolment had become universal? Japan’s path to
modernisation, like that of any other country, has had its
own tensions: those between democracy and militarism,
ethnic nationalism and civic nation-building and between what
many Japanese describe as ‘tradition’ and ‘westernisation’.
The Chinese resisted colonial exploitation and their own
bureaucratic landed elite through a combination of peasant
rebellion, reform and revolution. By the early 1930s, the
Chinese Communist Party, which drew its strength from
2024-25
  127
peasant mobilisation, had begun confronting the imperial
powers as well as the Nationalists who represented the
country’s elite. It had also started implementing its ideas in
selected pockets of the country. Its egalitarian ideology, stress
on land reforms and awareness of women’s problems helped
it overthrow foreign imperialism and the Nationalists in 1949.
Once in power, it succeeded in reducing inequalities,
spreading education and creating political awareness. Even
so, the country’s single-party framework and state repression
contributed to considerable dissatisfaction with the political
system after the mid-1960s. But the Chinese Communist Party
has been able to retain control over the country largely
because, in embracing certain market principles, it reinvented
itself and has worked hard to transform China into an
economic powerhouse.
The different ways in which various countries have
understood ‘modernity’ and sought to achieve it, each in the
context of its own circumstances and ideas, make a fascinating
story. This section introduces you to some aspects of that
story.
2024-25