IB History Economic Factors Notes

Economic Factors: How Economic Conditions Fuelled Popular Movements

Overview

1. Economic conditions have been central to the emergence of popular movements throughout history.
2. In the 18th century, families spent the majority of their income on bread.
3. Anything disrupting food production, such as a failed harvest, could unleash widespread disorder: social, economic and psychological.
4. As historian Steven Kaplan writes about 18th-century France, a "particularly disastrous harvest" could set "the ration and price of survival" and produce a "terrible multiplier effect".
5. Some 250 years later, researchers were still linking unrest to rising food prices.
6. In 2010, a report submitted to the US government on 13 December warned about rising food prices and associated upheaval.
7. Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia, marking the start of the Arab Spring.
8. Modernisation is also associated with the emergence of popular movements.
9. The first Industrial Revolution in the mid-18th century uprooted people from rural areas into growing urban centres.
10. Workers went from producing end products directly to becoming small steps in factory processes.
11. The second Industrial Revolution from the mid-19th century laid foundations for mass production, impacting small businesses and creating global trade networks.
12. When societies see a decline in per capita income, this creates insecurity and can unite groups against a government perceived as responsible.
13. The 1929 Wall Street Crash caused massive financial losses, widespread unemployment and over a decade of depression, fuelling protests and strikes worldwide.

Types of economic inequality

1. Horizontal inequality refers to how different groups in society have accumulated wealth differently.
2. European nations created extreme horizontalinequality in their colonies by exploiting or enslaving millions.
3. Vertical inequality refers to the wealth gap between the richest and poorest within a country.

1. The French Revolution was partly fuelled by the lavish lifestyle of the king while his subjects starved.
2. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement similarly protested inequality and the perceived moral bankruptcy of banks and corporations.
3. Reduced government revenue can directly challenge a government's operations.
4. The 1929 crash deeply affected Germany's fragile economy, causing people to lose faith in democracy and laying foundations for Hitler's rise to power.

Case studies

1. This section examines economic factors across four case studies:
   1. The British suffragette movement explores how the Industrial Revolution changed women's economic roles and created both new opportunities and new forms of oppression.
   2. The Indian national movement examines how British colonial economic exploitation, or the "drain" of India's wealth, fuelled nationalist sentiment.
   3. The Indigenous rights movement in Canada traces how European settlers disrupted Indigenous subsistence economies and forced integration into capitalist systems.
   4. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 analyses how shifts from Arab socialism to economic liberalisation widened inequality and created mass discontent.