Class 10 History Chapter 3, The Making of a Global World, traces the long history of global interconnectedness from the pre-modern Silk Routes and Columbian exchange of foods and diseases through 19th-century colonialism, indentured labour, rinderpest in Africa, the Inter-war Economy and Great Depression (1929), to the post-WWII Bretton Woods system and G-77.
What Class 10 Social Science (History) Chapter 3 Covers
1. The Pre-modern World (Silk Routes, Food Travels & Conquest, Disease and Trade) follows the vibrant land and sea Silk Routes linking Asia with Europe and northern Africa, shows how spaghetti/noodles and Americas crops (potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes, chillies, sweet potatoes) travelled across continents after Christopher Columbus (including the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s), and explains how Spanish conquerors used smallpox germs against America’s original inhabitants who had no immunity.
2. The Nineteenth Century (1815–1914) identifies the three flows (trade, labour and capital), explains how the abolition of the British Corn Laws transformed global agriculture and Canal Colonies in Punjab, analyses how Rinderpest (cattle plague arriving in Africa in the late 1880s) killed $90\%$ of African cattle and forced Africans into colonial mines and plantations, and traces Indentured Labour Migration from India to the Caribbean (Hosay, Chutney music, V.S. Naipaul), Mauritius, Fiji, Ceylon and Malaya alongside Indian bankers (Shikaripuri shroffs and Nattukottai Chettiars).
3. The Inter-war Economy & 4. Rebuilding a World Economy: The Post-war Era covers WWI as the first modern industrial war, Henry Ford’s assembly-line mass production in the 1920s, the Great Depression (1929) and its severe impact on Indian peasants and jute growers (while urban fixed-income dwellers fared better and rural India exported gold), the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference creating the IMF and World Bank (‘Bretton Woods twins’), decolonisation and the G-77 demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), and the collapse of fixed exchange rates and rise of MNC production in low-wage Asian countries like China from the late 1970s.
Exercises in Chapter 3
- Write in Brief & Discuss (9 Questions) cover two examples of different types of global exchanges before the seventeenth century, how the global transfer of disease in the pre-modern world helped in the colonisation of the Americas, the effects of the British government’s decision to abolish the Corn Laws, the coming of rinderpest to Africa, the impact of the Great Depression on the Indian economy, what is meant by the Bretton Woods Agreement, and why the developing countries organised the G-77.
Read Class 10 Social Science (History) Chapter 3 Online
More Chapters
- Previous: Chapter 2: Nationalism in India
- Next: Chapter 4: The Age of Industrialisation
- Hindi medium: Class 10 History Chapter 3 PDF in Hindi (Bharat aur Samakalin Vishwa II)
- All Social Science (History) chapters and the other Class 10 books: Class 10 NCERT books 2026-27
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FAQ
What was the effect of the abolition of the Corn Laws in Britain?
After the Corn Laws were abolished, 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 left uncultivated, thousands of agricultural workers were thrown out of work and migrated to cities or overseas, while falling food prices raised consumption in Britain and spurred railway, port and land clearance across Russia, America, Australia and India.
What is meant by the Bretton Woods Agreement, and why did developing countries form the G-77?
Agreed at the UN Monetary and Financial Conference in July 1944 at Bretton Woods (New Hampshire, USA), the Bretton Woods Agreement established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to deal with external surpluses and deficits and the World Bank to finance post-war reconstruction, pegging currencies to the US dollar at fixed exchange rates. Because most developing nations did not benefit from the fast growth of Western economies in the 1950s and 1960s, they organised themselves as the Group of 77 (G-77) to demand a New International Economic Order (NIEO) giving them real control over their natural resources, fairer prices for raw materials, and better access for their manufactured goods in developed markets.