World History Mixed Practice — MCQs with Answers (Set 14)

The 2008 global financial crisis renewed serious debate about capitalism’s stability and fairness, challenging assumptions behind the “end of history” thesis.

World-systems analysis, developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, examines global economics as one interconnected system of core, periphery, and semi-periphery nations.

Fukuyama argued liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had emerged as humanity’s final form of government, ending major ideological conflict.

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama proposed the “end of history” thesis in 1989, following the Soviet bloc’s collapse.

After the war, Britain and France administered former Ottoman Arab territories as League of Nations mandates, not full colonies.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk abolished the Ottoman sultanate and later the caliphate, founding a secular Turkish republic.

During the war, Arab forces revolted against Ottoman rule, in what became known as the Arab Revolt.

The 1917 Balfour Declaration saw Britain express support for a Jewish national home in Palestine, then still Ottoman territory.

Britain and France secretly agreed to divide Ottoman Arab territories between themselves, in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Adam Smith’s laissez-faire economics developed partly as a direct critique of mercantilist colonial trade restrictions.

Enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to work on plantations producing sugar, cotton, and tobacco for European markets.

The triangular trade linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas, moving manufactured goods, enslaved people, and raw materials between them.

Mercantilism was the dominant colonial-era economic theory, holding that a nation’s wealth depended on accumulating gold and silver.

The correct answer is Gold. Bretton Woods fixed currencies to the US dollar. The dollar itself was fixed to gold at $35 an ounce. That link ended in August 1971.

Silver, oil and Treasury bonds were never what the dollar was tied to under this system.

Memory hook: Currencies to dollar, dollar to gold.

A separate agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, was signed in 1947 to reduce trade barriers.

The Bretton Woods Conference, held in the United States in 1944, created the framework for the post-war international economic system.

Franco’s Nationalists won the war in 1939, and Franco ruled Spain as a dictator for decades afterward.

George Orwell’s book ‘Homage to Catalonia’ is a widely read firsthand account of fighting in the war.

Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion bombed the Basque town of Guernica in 1937, inspiring Picasso’s famous painting.

George Marshall later won the Nobel Peace Prize, largely for his role in proposing this recovery plan.

The Soviet Union responded with its own aid programme for Eastern Bloc states, called the Molotov Plan.

The plan followed the Truman Doctrine, which had committed the US to containing the spread of communism.

The plan was named after US Secretary of State George Marshall, who first proposed it in 1947.

The United States had provided France with substantial military and financial aid during the war, worried about communist expansion.