question_answer

Explain the causes of the Great Depression of 1929. OR Describe the important features of 'proto-industrialization' in Europe. OR Explain with examples how industrialization changed the form of urbanization in England during the modern period?                                                                         (3)  

Answer:

The Great Depression was caused lay a combination of factors. Some of these were (i) Agricultural overproduction led to falling agricultural prices. To maintain their overall income, farmers tried to expand production, which led to a glut in the market. Farm produce rotted due to lack of buyers. (ii) The USA withdrew loans given earlier to European and Latin American countries. causing some banks in Europe to fail and European currencies to collapse. (iii) In Latin America and elsewhere, it intensified the slump in agricultural and raw material prices. (iv) The USA doubled import duties to protect its economy, dealing a severe blow to world trade. intensifying the depression. OR Important features of proto-industrialization are given below (i) Cloth merchants shifted their supply base to the countryside, providing loans to peasants and artisans for producing cloth for an international market. (ii) The peasants and artisans could continue cultivating their small plots while producing cloth, thus supplementing their shrinking income from cultivation. (iii) Within this system a close relationship developed between the towns and the countryside, as the merchants were based in the towns but the work was done in the countryside. (iv) This domestic system of proto-industrialization was a primitive system of production, but became part of a vast network of commercial exchanges. OR The city encouraged a new spirit of individualism among both men and women, which was different from that of the smaller rural communities. As women lost their industrial jobs and conservative people opposed their presence in public spaces, women withdrew into domesticity. Most political movements of the nineteenth century mobilized large numbers of men, but gradually women started participating in political movements for universal suffrage and other rights. By the twentieth century, the urban family had been transformed by the experience of the valuable wartime work done by women, who were employed in large numbers to meet war demands. The family now consisted of much smaller units. The family became the centre of a market for goods, services, and ideas.