← 🏛️ World history · usually met in Std 8-12
Two conflicts, thirty years apart, that reshaped the map, ended empires and left the institutions the world still runs on.
The First World War, 1914-18, began from a tangle of alliances and imperial rivalry and became a war of trenches, machine guns and artillery on a scale nobody had planned for. Around a million and a half Indian soldiers served in it. The settlement afterwards left Germany humiliated and much of Europe unstable.
The Second, 1939-45, was fought across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. It included the Holocaust — the systematic murder of around six million Jews along with Roma, disabled people and others — and ended with the only use of nuclear weapons in war, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United Nations was created afterwards in the hope of preventing a third, and the European empires, exhausted, began to dissolve: India's independence in 1947 is part of that aftermath.
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