Internals

Question 1

Role of Technology

Answer 1

The railways, steamships, the telegraph were important inventions without which we cannot imagine the transformed nineteenth-century world.

Technological advances were often the result of larger social, political and economic factors.

For example, colonisation stimulated new investments and improvements in transport: faster railways, lighter wagons and larger ships helped move food more cheaply and quickly from faraway farms to final markets.

The trade in meat offers a good example of this connected process. Till the 1870s, animals were shipped live from America to Europe and then slaughtered when they arrived there. But live animals took
up a lot of ship space. Many also died in voyage, fell ill, lost weight, or became unfit to eat. Meat was hence an expensive luxury beyond the reach of the European poor. High prices in turn kept demand and production down until the development of a new technology, namely, refrigerated ships, which enabled the transport of perishable
foods over long distances

Now animals were slaughtered for food at the starting point – in America, Australia or New Zealand – and then transported to
Europe as frozen meat. This reduced shipping costs and lowered meat prices in Europe. The poor in Europe could now consume a more varied diet

Question 2

Flourishing of trade and globalisation in the 19th century” pros and cons.

Answer 2

PROS:
1 trade expanded
2 increased prosperity

CONS:
1 loss of freedoms and livelihoods
2 Late nineteenth-century European conquests produced many painful
economic, social and ecological changes through which the colonised societies were brought into the world economy.