(i) In the first few years of the War the German army seemed unstoppable.
(ii) Poland was easily defeated within two weeks and divided between Germany and the Soviet Union in a second agreement signed in Moscow in September 1939.
(iii) In April 1940 Germany occupied Norway. With this annexation, Hitler ensured the. protection of Germany's supply of iron ore from Sweden apart from obtaining naval and air bases with which to strike at Britain.

(i) Even more significant than the Sino-Japanese War was the Japanese defeat of Russia in 1904-05. Following the ''Triple Intervention," Russia had occupied southern Manchuria.
(ii) Japan entered into an alliance with England in 1902 and demanded that Russia withdraw its troops. Russia underestimated Japan. In 1904 a war broke out.
(iii) In this Russo-Japanese War, Japan was victorious and by the treaty of Portsmouth signed at the mediation of the USA, Japan got back Port Arthur.
(iv) With this war Japan had entered the "charmed circle of the great Powers.

English economist John A. Hobson defined Imperialism as follows:
Imperialism is the endeavour of the great controllers of industry to broaden the channel for the flow of their surplus wealth by seeking foreign markets and foreign investments to take off the goods and capital they cannot sell or use at home.

Karl Marx had this to say on the Commune: "It represented the greatest challenge the new world of capital had yet faced and the greatest inspiration to the new class created by capital in opposition to it".

(i) In 1834, Prussia was successful in establishing the Zollverein (customs union).
(ii) By the 1840s it included most of the Germanic states except those under the control of Austria and provided economic unity to the Germanic states.
(iii) In 1848, popular pressure led to the introduction of an elected legislative assembly.

Belief in the abolition of state and organisation of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion.

1. In 1791, the national assembly drafted the constitution by which the powers of the king were limited.
2. It also proposed to have three different organs: executive, legislative and judiciary.
3. The members of the National Assembly were indirectly elected by a group of electors.
4. The electors were voted by the male citizens, who were above 25 years of age and who paid taxes.
5. Thus the majority of the citizens did not get voting rights.

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. The transatlantic slave trade is a blot in the history of humanity.
2. The Portuguese began the African slave trade at the opening of seventeenth century.
3. The other nations of Christian Europe followed immediately.
4. The first slaves to be brought to America came in a Dutch ship in 1619.
5. The first English man who realised that lots of money could be made by seizing ''unsuspecting negroes" in Africa and selling them to work on plantations in the New World (America) was John Hawkins.

1. The Commercial Revolution were the rise of the middle class to economic power.
2. The middle class ranks included merchants, bankers, ship owners, principal investors and industrial entrepreneurs.
3. Their rise to power was the result of increasing wealth and their support to the king against the feudal aristocracy.

1. Although the Aztecs had superior numbers, with firearms and steel blades at his disposal, just one Spaniard could annihilate dozens or even hundreds of opponents:
2. ''On a sudden, they speared and thrust people into shreds", wrote one indigenous chronicler, a witness to the terrifying impact of European arms.
3. "Others were beheaded in one swipe Others tried to run in vain from the butchery, their innards falling from them and entangling their very feet".
4. A smallpox epidemic-outbreak weakened the Aztec while giving Cortes time to regroup, resume fighting and finally emerge victorious.

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. The total production of food grains was not enough to feet the country, so that a large quantity of food grains had to be imported. Nearly 80 percent of the population depanded on agriculture for their livelihood.
2. This automatically reduced the income of each person to very low levels. This is a situation described as "disguised unemployment".

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

Positive achievements
1. The expansion of the economy
2. The significant growth in national and per capita income
3. Increase in industrial production
4. Increased use-of modem inputs in agriculture and increase in agricultural production
5. A more diversified economy:
Failures of planning
1. Failure to eliminate poverty. Poverty levels have fallen, but still an unacceptably high number of persons are below the poverty line
2. Failure to provide full employment
3. Failure to reduce inequalities and prevent concentration of economic power
4. Failure to check the growth of black money.

On June 17, 1948, Chairman Rajendra Prasad set up a 3-member commission, called The Linguistic Provinces Commission with a specific brief to examine and report on the formation of new provinces of Andhra, Kerala, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Its report, submitted on December 10, 1948, listed out reasons against the idea of linguistic reorganisation in the given context. It dealt with each of the four proposed States - Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra - and concluded against such an idea.

The Indian National Congress, at its Nagpur session (1920), recorded that the national identity will have to be necessarily achieved through linguistic identity and resolved to set up the Provincial Congress Committees on a linguistic basis.

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. A battalion of the INA commanded by Shah Nawaz accompanied the Japanese army, in its march on Imphal.
2. This was in late 1944 and the Axis powers, including the Japanese forces, had fallen into bad times all over.
3. The Imphal campaign did not succeed and the Japanese retreated before the final surrender to the British command in mid-1945.
4. Shah Nawaz and his soldiers of the INA were taken prisoners and charged with treason.

1. Yet another prominent feature of the Quit India movement was the use of Radio by the rebels. The press being censored, the rebels set up a clandestine radio broadcast system from Bombay.
2. The transmitter was shifted from one place to another in and around the city. Usha Mehta was the force behind the clandestine radio operations and its broadcast was heard as far away as Madras.

1) Some of the early nationalists believed that nationalism could be built only on a Hindu foundation.
2) As pointed out by Sarvepalli Gopal, Hindu, revivalism found its voice in politics through the Arya Samaj, founded in 1875, with its assertion of superior qualities of Hinduism.
3) The organization of cow protection leagues in large parts of North India in the late nineteenth century gave a fillip to Hindu communalism.
4) The effort of organizations such as Arya Samaj was strengthened by the Theosophical movement led by Annie Besant from 1891.
5) Besant identified herself with Hindu nationalists and expressed her ideas as follows: The Indian work is first of all the revival, strengthening and uplifting of ancient religions.
6) This has brought with it a new self-respect, a pride in the past, a belief in the future and as an inevitable result, a great wave of patriotic life, the beginning of the rebuilding of a nation.

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.