the prospect of a depression, US banks had also slashed domestic lending and called back loans. Farms could not sell their harvests, households were ruined, and businesses collapsed. Faced with falling incomes, many households in the US could not repay what they had borrowed, and were forced to give up their homes, cars and other consumer durables. The consumerist prosperity of the 1920s now disappeared in a puff of dust.
As unemployment soared, people trudged long distances looking for any work they could find. Ultimately, the US banking system itself collapsed. Unable to recover investments, collect loans and repay depositors, thousands of banks went bankrupt and were forced to close. The numbers are phenomenal: by over , banks had closed and between and about , companies had collapsed.
By , a modest economic recovery was under way in most industrial countries. But the Great Depression’s wider effects on society, politics and international relations, and on peoples’ minds, proved more enduring. . India and the Great Depression If we look at the impact of the depression on India we realise how integrated the global economy had become by the early twentieth century.
The tremors of a crisis in one part of the world were quickly relayed to other parts, affecting lives, economies and societies worldwide. In the nineteenth century, as you have seen, colonial India had become an exporter of agricultural goods and importer of manufactures. The depression immediately affected Indian trade. India’s exports Fig.
– People lining up for unemployment benefits, US, photograph by Dorothea Lange, . Courtesy: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. When an unemployment census showed million people out of work, the local government in many US states began making small allowances to the unemployed. These long queues came to symbolise the poverty and unemployment of the depression years .
grow more jute, brothers, with the hope of greater cash. Costs and debts of jute will make your hopes get dashed. When you have spent all your money and got the crop off the ground, … traders, sitting at