How the world got connected

Word	What it means
Age of exploration	European voyages from about 1450, driven by trade routes, wealth and territory.
Columbian exchange	The transfer of plants, animals, people and diseases between the Americas and the rest of the world.
Mercantilism	Colonies supply raw materials and buy manufactured goods, enriching the home country. Assumes global wealth is fixed.
Industrial Revolution	Began in Britain in the late 18th century. Created demand for raw materials and markets for manufactures.
Scramble for Africa	European powers dividing the continent among themselves, formalised at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85.
Decolonization	Colonies becoming sovereign states, mostly between 1945 and 1975.
Self-determination	A people deciding its own political status.
Partition	Dividing a territory along national or religious lines, as in India and Pakistan in 1947.

Date	Event	Used to argue
from 1492	European contact with the Americas	Globalization is not new; disease was the largest effect
16th–19th c.	Transatlantic slave trade	The human cost of historical globalization
16th–18th c.	Mercantilism	Colonial economies built to serve elsewhere — a lasting structure
late 1700s	Industrial Revolution begins in Britain	Why trade became empire
1876	Indian Act	A legacy still in force
1884–85	Berlin Conference	Borders drawn in Europe that still cause conflict
1947	Indian independence and partition	Self-determination's promise and its cost
1948	Universal Declaration of Human Rights	Universalism, and the limits of a declaration
1945–75	Decolonization	UN membership triples; colonial economies persist
1987	Brundtland Report	Sustainable development defined
1994 / 2020	NAFTA, then USMCA	Canadian evidence on free trade
1996	Last residential school closes	How recent the legacy is
2015	TRC final report	Cultural genocide; 94 Calls to Action

Extraction. Mercantilism built colonies to supply raw materials; industrialization increased the demand; the scramble for Africa formalised the control. Many former colonies still export raw materials, which is the link from Related Issue 2 to Related Issue 3.

Self-determination. Invoked at Versailles for Europe and withheld from colonies, then used by those colonies to argue for independence after 1945. Applying it is hard because populations are mixed: any border leaves someone as a minority, which is what partition demonstrates.

Rights. The 1948 Declaration, the 1987 Brundtland definition and the 2005 Responsibility to Protect are three attempts to write down obligations that cross borders. None is directly enforceable, and that gap between statement and enforcement is a recurring theme.

The pattern: what happened, what it shows, why that supports your position.

Worked. “At the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, European powers divided Africa among themselves without a single African representative present, drawing borders that cut across existing peoples. This shows that historical globalization organised the world for the convenience of those doing the organising. It supports the argument that present inequalities have structural causes rather than accidental ones, because many of those borders — and the conflicts along them — are still in place.”

Event, claim, link. That is the unit of a good social studies paragraph, and it is repeatable under exam conditions.

• Dates with no argument attached.
• Treating historical globalization as purely exploitative without acknowledging that exchange also occurred — then weighing it.
• Confusing colonialism with imperialism. One is a method, one is the policy.
• Leaving Canada out. The course expects Canadian evidence, including the uncomfortable kind.