World History for UPSC — Glossary

The Évian Accords were a March 1962 ceasefire treaty between France and the Algerian provisional government that ended the Algerian War and granted Algeria independence.

"Always close with significance" is an answer-writing maxim instructing candidates to end every exam response with a paragraph stating the topic's broader importance or consequence.

Analysis and comparison is the historiographical method of breaking events into causal components and juxtaposing parallel cases to draw reasoned, evidence-based conclusions.

Analytical framing is the historian's deliberate choice of interpretive lens, periodisation, and causal scheme through which past events are organised and explained.

The April Theses were ten directives Vladimir Lenin issued in April 1917 demanding Bolshevik opposition to the Provisional Government, peace, land redistribution, and "All Power to the Soviets."

Bloody Sunday refers to the 22 January 1905 massacre in St Petersburg when Tsarist troops fired on unarmed petitioners, igniting the 1905 Russian Revolution.

Capital and finance denote the accumulation, mobilisation and investment of monetary wealth that powered industrial expansion, imperialism and the modern world economy.

Causation and significance are the twin analytical tools historians use to explain why events happened and to assess their lasting importance and consequences.

Comecon was the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, founded in 1949 to coordinate economic planning and trade among socialist states of the Eastern Bloc.

The Cominform was the Communist Information Bureau established by the Soviet Union in 1947 to coordinate the policies of European communist parties during the early Cold War.

The Communist International (Comintern) was a Moscow-led organisation founded by Lenin in 1919 to coordinate communist parties worldwide toward global proletarian revolution.

The Communist Manifesto is the 1848 political pamphlet by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that set out the theory of class struggle and called for proletarian revolution against capitalism.

Comparative and thematic refers to an analytical approach in world history that studies historical processes across regions and periods through shared themes rather than isolated national narratives.

Conceptual precision is the analytical discipline of using historical and political terms strictly according to their defined meaning, scope, and period, avoiding anachronism and loose equivalence.

Count Camillo Benso di Cavour (1810-1861) was the Piedmont-Sardinian premier whose diplomacy engineered Italian unification under the House of Savoy.

The Danish War of 1864 was the conflict in which Prussia and Austria defeated Denmark to wrest control of the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein, and Lauenburg.

The Decree on Land was the second decree of the Bolshevik government, passed on 8 November 1917, abolishing private landed property without compensation and transferring it to peasant committees.

The Decree on Peace was a proclamation adopted by the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 26 October (8 November) 1917, calling for an immediate, just, and democratic peace without annexations or indemnities.

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman and political thinker regarded as the founder of modern conservatism.

In historical analysis, causation is the identification of why an event occurred, while effects are its consequences, distinguished by time-frame, weight, and the chain linking cause to outcome.

The Factory Act 1833 was a British statute regulating child labour in textile mills, notable for creating the first paid factory inspectorate to enforce its provisions.

The Fall of Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954 was the decisive Viet Minh victory over French forces that ended the First Indochina War.

Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882) was the Italian revolutionary general whose military campaigns, especially the 1860 Expedition of the Thousand, unified southern Italy with the Piedmontese north.

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) was an Italian revolutionary and democratic-republican ideologue who founded Young Italy and provided the moral-nationalist programme for Italian unification.

Global ripple effects denote the transmission of shocks from one country or region through interconnected economic, political, and security channels to distant parts of the world system.

The INF Treaty was a 1987 US–Soviet arms-control accord that eliminated all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometres.

John Locke (1632–1704) was an English philosopher whose theories of natural rights, social contract, and limited government founded classical liberalism.

The Mahdist state was the Islamic theocratic regime that ruled most of Sudan from 1885 to 1898, founded by the self-proclaimed Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad after revolt against Egyptian-Turkish rule.

Montesquieu (1689–1755) was a French Enlightenment political philosopher whose theory of the separation of powers shaped modern constitutionalism.

The New Economic Policy (NEP) was Lenin's 1921 economic programme that partially restored market mechanisms and private trade in Soviet Russia after the failure of War Communism.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is a 1968 multilateral treaty that seeks to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, promote disarmament, and enable peaceful nuclear cooperation.

The Petrograd Soviet was the council of workers' and soldiers' deputies formed in Russia's capital in March 1917 that became the chief rival power to the Provisional Government.

Popular sovereignty is the doctrine that legitimate political authority derives from the consent of the governed, making the people the ultimate source of state power.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Genevan Enlightenment philosopher whose theory of the social contract and popular sovereignty inspired the French Revolution and modern democratic thought.

SALT I was the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreement, signed by the United States and Soviet Union in 1972, freezing offensive missile launchers and restricting missile defences.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the December 1979 military intervention by the USSR to prop up a Marxist government, triggering a decade-long war that ended with Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

The Tehran Conference was the first wartime meeting of the Allied "Big Three"—Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin—held in Iran from 28 November to 1 December 1943.

"Treaty of Paris" denotes several distinct peace treaties signed in Paris, most notably the 1783 treaty ending the American Revolutionary War and recognising US independence.

War Communism was the coercive economic system imposed by Bolshevik Russia from 1918 to 1921 to supply the Red Army during the Civil War through requisitioning, nationalisation, and labour conscription.