NCERT Textbook: The Making of a Global World | Social Studies (SST) Class 10 PDF Download

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SECTION II
LIVELIHOODS, ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES
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SECTION II
LIVELIHOODS, ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES
Reprint 2025-26 Reprint 2025-26
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SECTION II
LIVELIHOODS, ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES
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53
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 III
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.
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SECTION II
LIVELIHOODS, ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES
Reprint 2025-26 Reprint 2025-26
53
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 III
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.
Reprint 2025-26
India and the Contemporary World
54
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.
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SECTION II
LIVELIHOODS, ECONOMIES AND SOCIETIES
Reprint 2025-26 Reprint 2025-26
53
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 III
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.
Reprint 2025-26
India and the Contemporary World
54
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.
Reprint 2025-26
55
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
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