1. The Quebec Act passed by the British government in 1774 awarded the territory between the Ohio-and Mississippi rivers to the province of Quebec.
2. The colonial governments of New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia were angered by the unilateral assignment of the Ohio lands to Quebec, which had been granted to them in their royal charters.

1. Three systems of revenue collection have been introduced by the British.
2. In Bengal and most of north India, the Permanent Settlement placed the responsibility of paying land revenue on the rentier class of zamindars.
3. In south India, the cultivators paid the land revenue demand directly to the government under the system known as "ryotwari" ('ryot' means cultivator).
4. The third system, found in very small pockets of the country, was 'malware' where the village was collectively responsible for paying the land revenue.

1. Zamindar referred to the class of landowners who had been designated during British rule as the intermediaries who paid the land revenue to the government under a Permanent Settlement.
2. They collected rent from peasants cultivating their land and were obliged to remit a fixed amount to the government as land taxes.

1. Agriculture is another area where there has been a significant expansion of research and development.
2. The Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) is the coordinating agency for the research done not only in basic agriculture, but also associated activities like fishery, forests, dairy, plant genetics, bio-technology, varieties of crops like rice, tubers, fruits and pest control

The long, militant struggle that went on in the Travancore State for Responsible Government culminating in the Punnapra-Vayalar anned struggle against the Diwan, Sir C.P. Ramaswamy, the Praja Mandai as well as some tribal agitations that took place in the Orissa region - Nilagiri, Dhenkanal and Talcher - and the movement against the Maharaja of Mysore conducted by the Indian National Congress all played a major role in the integration of Princely States.

1) The H.S.R.A was a renewed chapter of the Hindustan Republican Association.
2) Its aim was the overthrow of the capitalist and imperialist government and establish a socialist society through a revolution.
3) The H.S.R.A involved a number of actions such as the murder of Saunders in Lahore.
4) In that, Saunders was mistaken for the Superintendent of Police, Labore, James A. Scott who was responsible for seriously assaulting Lajpat Rai, in December 1928, and Rai's subsequent death.
5) They also made an attempt to blow up the train in which Lord Irwin (Governor-General and Viceroy of India, 1926-1931) was travelling, in December 1929, and a large number of such actions in Punjab and UP in 1930.

1) The peasants of Kheda district, due to the failure of monsoon, were in distress. They had appealed to the colonial authorities for remission of land revenue during 1918.
2) As per government's famine code, in the event of crop yield being under 25 percent of the average the cultivators were entitled for total remission.
3) But the authorities refused and harassed them demanding full payment. The Kheda peasants who were also battling the plague epidemic, high prices and famine approached the Servants of India Society, of which Gandhi was a member, for help.
4) Gandhi, along with Vithalbhai Patel, intervened on behalf of the poor peasants and advised them to withhold payment and 'fight unto death against such a spirit of vindictiveness and tyranny'. Vallabhbhai Patel, a young lawyer and Indulal Yagnik joined Gandhi in the movement and urged the ryots to be firm.
5) The government repression included attachment of crops, taking possession of the belongings of the ryots and their cattle and in some cases auctioning them.

1) The Home Rule Leagues prepared the ground for mass mobilization paving the way for the launch of Gandhi's satyagraha movements.
2) Many of the early Gandhian satyagraha is had been members of the Home Rule Leagues. They used the organisational networks created by the Leagues to spread the Gandhian method of agitation.
3) Home Rule League was the first Indian political movement to cut across sectarian Jines and have members from the Congress, League, Theosophist and the Laborites.

1) During the freedom struggle, the idea of Swadeshi movement was conceptualized first during 1905 by a string of Congress leaders and then later in the 1920s under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi.
2) Swadeshi means 'of one's own country'. The origin of the idea can be traced to 1872 when Mahadev Govind Ranade, in a series of lectures in Poona, popularised the idea of Swadeshi. According to Ranade, the goods produced in one's own country should be given preference even if the use of such goods proved to be less satisfactory.
3) In the 1920s Gandhi gave a new meaning to the idea of Swadeshi by linking to the fulfillment of a duty that all Indians owed to the land of their birth.

1. The French people believed that political prisoners in the jails were planning to join a plot of the counter-revolutionaries.
2. So the mob descended on the prisons.
3. Summarily executed those they believed to be royalists.
4. In all about 1,200 prisoners were killed in what came to be known as the September Massacres.

1. The concepts of democracy and republic became widespread.
2. The political and social changes were on the lines of democracy and equality.
3. Education gained prominence.
4. The principle of federalism became widespread.

1. SEATO is seen as an Asian-Pacific version of NATO.
2. Interestingly only two south-east Asian countries, the Philippines and Thailand, had taken up membership and the rest of the countries refused to be part of it.
3. The alliance was headquartered at Bangkok. SEATO existed only for consultation, leaving each individual nation to react individually to internal threats. SEATO was not as popular as NATO.
4. With the end of Vietnam War, SEATO was disbanded in 1977.

(i) On 3 August 1492 Columbus sailed from the harbour of Palos, with three small ships.
(ii) After a voyage of two months, he came to a land which he believed to be India.
(iv) But it wag really a new continent, America.
(v) They were called Indians because, he believed that the land he had discovered was India.

(i) The most negative result of the Commercial Revolution was the revival of slavery. Slavery had virtually disappeared from European society by the end of the first millennium.
(ii) But the development of mining and plantation farming in the Spanish, Portuguese and English colonies led to the recruitment of slaves as unskilled labourers.
(iii) The attempt to enslave native Americans ended in failure, as they proved too tough to manage. The problem was solved by importing Africans.
(iv) This transatlantic slave trade that exported more than 11 million Africans to the Americas is a sordid story that is a shame on the making of the modem world.

(i) John Cabot, an Itali are explorer saw the Canada and made it an English colony.
(ii) Giovanni da Verrazano, another Italian, explored the lands for the French.
(iii) He annexed provinces for the French in eastern Canada.
(iv) An English explorer named Henry Hudson wanted to find the passage from North America to the Pacific Ocean.

1) A meeting between Gandhi and Ambedkar on this issue of separate electorates before they went to London to attend the Second Round Table Conference ended in failure.
2) There was an encounter between the two again in the RTC about the same issue. It ended in a deadlock and finally the issue was left to be arbitrated by the British Prime Minister Ramsay McDonald.
3) The British government announced in August 1932 what came to be known as the Communal Award. Ambedkar's demands for separate electorates with reserved seats were conceded.

1) In 1815, the Governor of Madras received a communication from the Governor of Ceylon asking for "coolies" to work on the coffee plantations.
2) The Madras Governor forwarded this letter to the collector of Thanjavur, who reported that the people were very much attached to the soil and unless some incentive was provided it was not easy to make them move out of their native soil.
3) But the outbreak of two famines (1833 and 1843) forced the people, without any prompting from the government, to leave for Ceylon to work as coolies in coffee and tea plantations under the indentured labour system.

1) The introduction of printing press in India was an event of great significance. It helped people to spread, modem ideas of self-government, democracy, civil rights and industrialisation.
2) The press became the critic of politics. It addressed the people on several issues affecting the country.
3) Raja Rammohan Roy's Sam bad Kaumudi (1821) in Bengali and Mirat-Ul-Akbar (1822) in Persian played a progressive role in educating the people on issues of public importance.
4) Later on a number of nationalist and vernacular news papers came to be launched to build public opinion and they did yeomen service in fostering nationalist consciousness.
5) Among them Amrit Bazaar Patrika, The Bombay Chronicle, The Tribune, The Indian Mirror, The Hindu and Swadesamitran were prominent.

The backwardness of agriculture could be attributed to two factors: institutional and technological.
(i) Institutional factors refer to the social and economic relations that prevailed, particularly between the land-owning classes and the cultivating classes. 
(ii) Technological factors relate to use of better seeds, improved methods of cultivation, use of chemical fertilizers, use of machinery like tractors and harvester combines, and provision of irrigation.

Tenancy reform legislation was aimed at achieving three ends:
(i) to regulate the rent;
(ii) to secure the rights of the tenant;
(iii) to confer ownership rights on the tenants by expropriating the land of the landowners.

1) The challenges before free India included grappling with the consequences of partition, planning the economy and reforming the education system, making a Constitution that reflected the aspirations kindled by the freedom struggle, merger of the Princely states, and resolving the diversity on the basis of languages spoken by the people with the needs of a nation-state.
2) Further, a foreign policy that was in tune with the ideals of democracy, sovereignty and fraternity had to be formulated.

1) Patel had been negotiating with the Maharaja of Kashmir since 1946, Hari Singh was opposed to accession.
2) However, in a few months after independence - in October 1947 - marauders from Pakistan raided Kashmir and there was no way that Maharaja Hari Singh could resist this attack on his own. Before India went to his rescue the Instrument of Accession was signed by him at the instance of Patel.
3) Thus Kashmir too became an integral part of the Indian Union.

The Muslim League, the Shiromani Akali Dal and the Hindu Maha Sabha, all those who had stayed clear of the Quit India campaign, joined the protests and raised funds for their defence.

Communalism:
1) Organising a religious group on the basis of its hostility towards the followers of other religions to fight even material issues.
2) Communalism as an ideology or movement has been defined in various ways by various scholars.
3) According to Nehru, communalism is one of the obvious examples of backward-looking people trying to hold on to something that is wholly out of place in the modem world and is essentially opposed to the concept of nationalism.
4) According to another scholar, communalism denotes organised attempt of a group to bring about change in the face of resistance from other groups or the government through collective mobilisation based on a narrow ideology.

Centrally organized political parties exclusively for Muslims, had the following objectives:
1) To promote among the Muslims of India feelings of loyalty to the British Government, and remove any misconception that may arise as to the instruction of Government with regard to any of its measures.
2) To protect and advance the political rights and interests of Muslims of India, and to respectfully represent their needs and aspirations to the Government.
3) To prevent the rise among the Muslims of India of any feeling of hostility towards other communities without prejudice to the aforementioned objects of the League.