Structural Change - Solutions
CBSE Class 12 Sociology
1. How has colonialism impacted our lives? You can either focus on one aspect like culture or politics or treat them together.
Ans. • Many modern ideas and institutions reached India through colonialism. It is also because such an exposure to modern ideas was contradictory or paradoxical. For example Indians in the colonial period read about western liberalism and freedom. Yet they lived under a western, colonial rule that denied Indians liberty and freedom.
• Our social reform and nationalist movement, our laws, our political life and our Constitution, our industry and agriculture, our cities and our villages have been shaped by our paradoxical experience with colonialism. This has had lasting implications for our specific experience with modernity.
• Colonialism brought into being new political, economic and social structural changes.
• British colonialism was based on a capitalist system that directly interfered to ensure greatest profit and benefit to British capitalism. Every policy was geared towards the strengthening and expansion of British capitalism.
• It changed not just land ownership laws but decided even what crops ought to be grown and what ought not to be. Colonialism also led to considerable movement of people. It led to movement of people from one part to another within India.
• Colonialism introduced a wide array of changes in every sphere, be it legal or cultural or architectural. Colonialism was a story apart in the very scale and intensity of the changes that it brought about. Some of these changes were deliberate while some took place in an unintended fashion.
2. Industrialisation and urbanisation are linked processes. Discuss.
Ans. • Industrialisation refers to the emergence of machine production, based on the use of inanimate power resources like steam or electricity.
• A prime feature of industrial societies is that a large number of people are employed in factories, offices or shops rather than agriculture. Over 90% people are living in cities and towns where most jobs are to be found and new job opportunities are created e.g. in Britain the first society to undergo industrialisation was also the earliest to move from being rural to an urban community.
• In India, the impact of British industrialisation led to deindustrialisation in some sectors and decline of old urban centres. It led to the emergence of new colonial elites e.g. cities like Surat and Masulipatnam lost their charm and Bombay and Madras emerged as important cities.
• When manufacturing units boomed in Britain, traditional export of cotton and silk manufactures of India declined because they could not compete to Manchester.
• Other than eastern India where British penetration was earliest and deepest, survived much more longer e.g. village crafts in the interior could survive. They were affected only with the spread of railways.
• The government of India after Independence played significant role in protecting and promoting industrialisation.
3. Identify any town or city with which you are familiar. Find out both the history of its growth and its contemporary status.
Ans. • Cities had a key role in the economic system of empires. Coastal cities such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai were favoured. From here primary commodities could be easily exported and manufactured goods could be cheaply imported.
• Colonial cities were the prime link between the economic centre or core in Britain and periphery or margins in colonised India. Cities in this sense were the concrete expression of global capitalism.
• Calcutta exported jute to Dundee while Madras sent coffee, sugar, indigo dyes and cotton to Britain.
• Urbanisation in the colonial period saw the decline of some earlier urban centres and the emergence of new colonial cities. Kolkata was one of the first of such cities.
• In 1690, an English merchant named Job Charnock arranged to lease three villages (named Kolkata, Gobindapur, and Sutanuti) by the river Hugli in order to set up a trading post.
• In 1698, Fort William was established by the river for defensive purposes, and a large open area was cleared around the fort for military engagements. The fort and the open area (called Maidan) formed the core of the city that emerged rather rapidly.
