World History: Revolutions, Wars and Decolonisation

The Industrial Revolution (about 1750–1850)

• It started in Britain. The reasons were coal and iron deposits, capital from trade and colonies, the enclosure of common land (which freed labour), a strong navy, and colonial markets.
• Key inventions:
  • the flying shuttle (Kay);
  • the spinning jenny (Hargreaves);
  • the water frame (Arkwright);
  • the steam engine improved by James Watt (1769);
  • railways (Stephenson).
• Effects:
  • the factory system and rapid urbanisation;
  • the working class, child labour and trade unions;
  • colonialism, because factories needed raw materials and markets;
  • de-industrialisation of colonies such as India.
• Ideas it produced: capitalism (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1776) and socialism and communism (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848).

The age of revolutions

• American Revolution (1775–83):
  • Grievance: "No taxation without representation" (Stamp Act; the Boston Tea Party, 1773).
  • Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776 (Jefferson).
  • Treaty of Paris, 1783.
  • US Constitution, 1787, with the Bill of Rights in 1791.
  • It was the first successful colonial revolt and the first written republican constitution.
• French Revolution (1789):
  • Causes:
    • the three Estates, in which the Third Estate bore the taxes;
    • royal debt;
    • Enlightenment thinkers: Rousseau (Social Contract, general will), Montesquieu (separation of powers), Voltaire.
  • Events:
    • the Tennis Court Oath;
    • the fall of the Bastille, 14 July 1789;
    • the Declaration of the Rights of Man;
    • the Reign of Terror (Robespierre);
    • Napoleon (Napoleonic Code; defeated at Waterloo, 1815).
  • Legacy: liberty, equality, fraternity, nationalism, and the end of feudal privilege.
• Congress of Vienna (1815) under Metternich tried to restore the old order. It was followed by the revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

Nationalism and unification in Europe

• Italy: Mazzini (Young Italy), Cavour (diplomacy) and Garibaldi (the Red Shirts). Unification was completed in 1861–70.
• Germany: Bismarck's policy of "blood and iron", wars with Denmark, Austria and France, and the German Empire proclaimed at Versailles in 1871.

Colonialism and imperialism

• The Scramble for Africa was settled at the Berlin Conference (1884–85). By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia in Africa were independent.
• China:
  • the Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60) and unequal treaties;
  • the Boxer Rebellion (1900);
  • the 1911 revolution (Sun Yat-sen);
  • the Communist Revolution (1949, Mao).
• Japan: the Meiji Restoration (1868) modernised the country. Japan defeated Russia in 1905, the first Asian victory over a European power, which inspired Indian nationalists.
• Theories of imperialism: Hobson, and Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).

World War I (1914–18)

• Causes (MAIN): Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism and Nationalism. The two alliances were the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy) and the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia).
• Immediate cause: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo (28 June 1914).
• Course:
  • trench warfare on the Western Front;
  • the USA entered in 1917 (after the Lusitania sinking and the Zimmermann telegram);
  • Russia left after its revolution;
  • the armistice was signed on 11 November 1918.
• India's part: about 1.3 million Indian soldiers served, and about 74,000 died. India Gate commemorates them.
• Treaty of Versailles (1919):
  • Germany was blamed for the war (the war guilt clause), paid reparations, lost its colonies, and the Rhineland was demilitarised.
  • It bred resentment that led to WWII.
• The League of Nations (1920) failed: the USA never joined, and it had no enforcement power.

The Russian Revolution (1917)

• The February Revolution ended Tsar Nicholas II's rule, and Kerensky formed a provisional government.
• In the October Revolution the Bolsheviks under Lenin took power with the slogan "Peace, Land and Bread".
• What followed: the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the civil war, the New Economic Policy (1921), and the USSR (1922).
• Under Stalin: Five-Year Plans and collectivisation. The Soviet model influenced India's planning.

Between the wars

• The Great Depression (1929), which began with the Wall Street crash, led to Roosevelt's New Deal and to Keynes's argument for government spending.
• Fascism (Mussolini, 1922) and Nazism (Hitler, 1933).
• Appeasement: the Munich Pact (1938).

World War II (1939–45)

• It began with Germany's invasion of Poland, 1 September 1939.
• Two sides: the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) and the Allies (Britain, France, then the USSR in 1941 and the USA after Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941).
• Turning points: Stalingrad (1942–43), D-Day (6 June 1944) and Midway (1942).
• The Holocaust: about 6 million Jews were killed.
• Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August) 1945. Germany surrendered in May 1945 and Japan in September 1945.
• Results:
  • the United Nations (Charter signed at San Francisco, June 1945);
  • the USA and USSR emerged as superpowers;
  • colonial powers were weakened, which sped up decolonisation: India in 1947, Indonesia in 1949, Ghana in 1957 (Nkrumah), Algeria in 1962.

The Cold War (1947–1991)

• The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan (1947); NATO (1949) against the Warsaw Pact (1955).
• Crises and wars:
  • the Korean War (1950–53);
  • the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962);
  • the Vietnam War (to 1975);
  • the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979).
• The Non-Aligned Movement (1961) of Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno and Nkrumah.
• Détente, then Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika.
• The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989; Germany reunited in 1990; the USSR dissolved in December 1991.
• Other events to know:
  • Apartheid in South Africa ended in 1994 with Nelson Mandela.
  • The European Union (Maastricht, 1992; the euro, 1999).
  • The creation of Israel (1948) and the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Political philosophies

Idea	Core belief	Thinkers
Liberalism	Individual rights, limited government, free markets	Locke, J. S. Mill, Adam Smith
Capitalism	Private ownership, market prices, profit	Adam Smith
Socialism	Social ownership of key resources, equality	Robert Owen, Fabians
Communism	Classless society through revolution; dialectical materialism	Marx, Engels, Lenin
Fascism	Ultra-nationalism, one-party rule, the state above the individual	Mussolini
Gandhian thought	Swaraj, satyagraha, trusteeship, decentralisation	Gandhi

Exam tip: UPSC GS I asks world history mainly through causes and consequences: why the League failed, the effects of decolonisation, how the Industrial Revolution led to imperialism. Build answers around 3–4 causes, the main events, and the impact, including the impact on India.