Print Culture and the Modern World Class 10 Notes History Chapter 5

Last Updated : 01 Aug, 2023

Print Culture and the Modern World Class 10 Notes examines the history of print, from its origins in East Asia to its spread in Europe, Japan, and India. While reading these notes, we will analyze the influence of the development of technology and how social life and cultures altered with the introduction of print.

These CBSE Class 10 Social Science Revision Notes cover all of the main topics in the chapter. These Print Culture and the Modern World Notes will assist students in developing an accurate command of CBSE Class 10 Chapter 5 (Print Culture and the Modern World).

Print Culture and Modern World Class 10 Notes History Chapter 5

The History Notes for Chapter 5 – Print Culture and the Modern World for Class 10 CBSE is provided here. They contain all the relevant information per the most recent CBSE Syllabus. To get all the history chapters in a single place, you can visit Class 10 History Notes.

Print Culture and The Modern World

1. The First Printed Books

Hand printing was the first type of print technology invented by China, Japan, and Korea. Beginning in AD 594, books in China were printed on rubbing paper and folded and sewn on both sides. For a long time, China’s imperial state was the leading producer of printed material. As China’s urban culture blossomed in the seventeenth century, the uses of print broadened. Scholar-officials, businessmen, and wealthy ladies began reading and writing their own poems and plays in print. Reading became more popular as a pastime. New technologies were drawn to this new reading culture. Western printing processes and machines for printing were brought in the late nineteenth century.

Print in Japan

Around the years 768-770, Buddhist missionaries from China introduced the hand-printing technique to Japan. The Buddhist Diamond Sutra, produced in AD 868, is the earliest Japanese book, with six pages of text and woodcut pictures. An instance collection of paintings presented a beautiful urban culture in the late eighteenth century, while libraries and bookshops were crammed with hand-printed literature of all sorts – books about ladies, musical instruments, and so on.

2. Print Comes to Europe

The route of silk brought Chinese paper to Europe in the eleventh century. Marco Polo came back to Europe after studying in China, bringing with him the expertise of woodblock printing. As the demand for books grew, bookstores around Europe started selling books to a variety of nations. Handwritten manuscripts could not keep up with the ever-increasing desire for books. Woodblocks were frequently utilized in Europe by the early fifteenth century. Johann Gutenberg invented the first printing press in the 1430s at Strasbourg.

Gutenberg and the Printing Press

Gutenberg is an expert in the art of polishing stones and with his existing knowledge, he adapted the existing technologies for designing his own innovations. The first printed book with the new system was the Bible. With the coming of new technologies, the existing technology of hand-made was not displaced completely. Books that were printed for the rich were left blank with space for decoration on the printed pages. Between 1450-1550, printing presses came to be set in most parts of Europe, and shift from the hand printing to mechanical printing led to the print revolution.

3. The Print Revolution and Its Impact

The Print Revolution was more than simply a new technique of creating books; it changed people’s relationships with information and knowledge, as well as with institutions and authority. Let’s have a look at some of these modifications.

A New Reading Public

With the invention of the printing press, a new reading audience arose. Previously, information was passed down verbally. Books may now reach a larger range of individuals. However, the shift was not easy because books could only be read by the educated. Printers began producing popular ballads and folk stories with illustrations for individuals who could not read. As a result, oral culture reached print, and printed literature was orally conveyed. And the hearing and reading publics grew entwined.

Religious Debates and the Fear of Print

Print enabled the widespread dissemination of ideas, ushering in a new era of debate and discussion. Printed books are not universally embraced. There was apprehension about the propagation of rebellious and irreligious ideas. Martin Luther, a Christian reformer, authored Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, opposing many of the Roman Catholic Church’s practices and ceremonies. The church was challenged to discuss his beliefs. This resulted in conflict within the Church and the start of the Protestant Reformation.

Print and Dissent

Menocchio began reading literature accessible in his neighbourhood in the sixteenth century. He redefined the Bible’s meaning and developed a picture of God and Creation that infuriated the Roman Catholic Church. Menocchio was brought up twice and eventually killed when the church launched its inquisition to suppress heretical views. The Roman Church began keeping an Index of Prohibited Books in 1558.

Read More: The Print Revolution and Its Impact

4. The Reading Mania

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when literacy and schools grew throughout Europe, there was a virtual reading craze. Penny chapbooks were carried by Chapman and were sold for a penny, allowing even the impoverished to purchase them. The same was the ‘Bibliotheque Bleue’ in France. Periodical press emerged in the early 18th century, combining current-events information with fun. The findings of Isaac Newton were published, which affected scientifically likely readers.

‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world!’

Many people felt that literature might alter the world by the mid-eighteenth century. In France, author Louise-Sebastien Mercier remarked, ‘The printing press is the most powerful engine of progress and public opinion is the force that will sweep despotism away. Mercier, convinced of the capacity of print to bring enlightenment and dismantle the foundations of authority and declared: ‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world! Tremble before the virtual writer!’

Print Culture and the French Revolution

Many historians claim that print culture provided the circumstances for the French Revolution. Typically, three sorts of arguments have been made.

The Enlightenment intellectuals’ views gained popularity thanks to print. They offered a critical commentary on custom, superstition, and authoritarianism in their writings. The works of Rousseau and Voltaire were extensively read, and as a result, people began to view the world with fresh, critical, and logical eyes.
A new discourse and debating culture were spawned by print. New notions for social upheaval emerged within this popular culture.
There was a flood of writing that made fun of the royalty and attacked their morals by the 1780s.

But it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone read the same kinds of books. Although print did not directly influence their thought processes, it did give rise to other ways of thinking.

Read More: Reading Mania in Europe

5. The Nineteenth Century

Massive advances in mass reading in Europe throughout the nineteenth century resulted in a large influx of new readers among children, women, and workers.

Children, Women, and Workers

In France, a children’s press that published just works for kids was founded in 1857. Traditional folktales were collected for years by the German Grimm Brothers before being published in 1812. Women were the target audience for penny publications. Women were seen as essential readers when novels first started to be published in the nineteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, there have been renowned libraries. In the nineteenth century, lending libraries in England were used to educate white-collar employees, craftspeople, and members of the lower middle class.

Further Innovations:

By the late eighteenth century, metal was being used to create presses. By the 19th century, printing technology had seen a number of additional advancements. Richard M. created the power-driven cylinder press during that century, which was mostly used for printing newspapers. The offset, which could print six colors at once, was created. Electrically powered presses increased printing processes by the 20th century, which was followed by additional advancements. These developments included:

Improved paper feeding techniques.
The plates’ quality improved.
Automatic paper reels and color register photoelectric controllers were introduced.

6. India and the World of Print

Let’s analyze how printing developed in India and how concepts and knowledge were recorded prior to the invention of print.

Manuscripts Before the Age of Print

India has a long legacy of producing handwritten manuscripts in many different vernaculars as well as in Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. These handwritten writings were printed on either homemade paper or palm-leaf paper. After the invention of print, the manuscript was still being produced. It is regarded as being extremely pricey and delicate. Many pupils in Bengal were literate without ever having read any form of literature since they were solely taught how to write.

Print comes to India

Together with Portuguese missionaries, the first printing press arrived in Goa. In the middle of the 16th century, the first Tamil book was produced in Cochin in 1579 by Catholic monks, as the first Malayalam book was published there in 1713. Even though the English East India Company started importing presses in the late seventeenth century, the English press didn’t really take off in India until much later. James Augustus Hickey was the editor of the Bengal Gazette, a weekly publication. Hickey issued advertisements along with a rumor regarding the Company’s top executives in India. There were several printed newspapers and journals at the end of the eighteenth century.

Read More: India and the World of Print

7. Religious Reform and Public Debates

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, religious questions were more contentious. People began to criticize current procedures and push for reform, while others refuted the reformers’ claims. Newspapers and printed pamphlets disseminated novel ideas and influenced the debate’s tone. Hindu orthodoxy and social and religious reformers disagreed on issues like immolation, monotheism, widow, the Brahmanical priesthood, and idolatry, sparking new ideas and heated debates. The Sambad Kaumudi was published in 1821 by Rammohan Roy. Jam-i-Jahan Nama and Shamsul Akhbar were published in two Persian newspapers in 1822. The Bombay Samachar, a Gujarati newspaper, was founded in the same year.

Since its founding in 1867, the Deoband Seminary has written many fatwas clarifying the meaning of Islamic concepts and advising Muslim readers on how to behave themselves in daily life. The Ramcharitmanas by Tulsidas was the first version of the Hindu scripture to be printed, and it was published in Calcutta in 1810. Beginning in 1880, other religious texts in vernaculars were also published by the Shri Venkateshwar Press in Bombay and the Novel Kishor Press in Lucknow.

Read More: Religious Reform and Public Debates

8. New Forms of Publication

As more and more people were interested in reading, new forms of writing were created. The novel, which was written by a literacy company that had grown in Europe, opened up a whole new universe of experiences and provided a real feeling of the variety of human lives. Other literacy tools included songs, essays, and short tales. A new visual culture was beginning to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century. Images for widespread distribution were created by painters like Rajaram Ravi Verma. Caricatures and cartoons had begun to appear by 1870.

Women and Print

Women’s lives and thoughts start to be depicted in writing in a particularly vivid and emotional manner. Women’s schools were established in urban areas. Journals also began publishing articles written by women that outlined the benefits of educating women. Conservative Hindus, meanwhile, thought that an educated girl would become a widow, and Muslims worried that reading Urdu romances would corrupt educated women. Women’s lives and emotions have attracted a lot of attention as a result of social changes and books. Women started publishing journals at the beginning of the 20th century, and they quickly gained enormous popularity. The publishing of best-selling books was the only focus of the Battala neighborhood in downtown Calcutta, Bengal. By the late nineteenth century, many of these volumes included copious woodcut and colored lithograph illustrations.

Print and the Poor People

Small, inexpensive books were offered for sale to the underprivileged in Madras throughout the nineteenth century. Caste discrimination concerns first appear in several printed texts and articles in the late 19th century, including those by Jyotiba Phule, B.R Ambedkar, and E.V Ramaswamy Naicker. Lack of knowledge prevented factory employees from writing extensively about their experiences. In order to demonstrate the connections between caste and class exploitation, Kashi Baba authored and published Chhote Aur Bade Ka Sawal in 1938. Bangalore cotton mill workers established libraries in the 1930s so they could educate themselves.

Read More: New Forms of Publications

9. Print and Censorship

Censorship was not an issue for the East India Company prior to 1798. The Calcutta Supreme Court then, established a number of restrictions on press freedom by the 1820s, and Governor-General Bentinck consented to amend the press laws in 1835. New regulations created by Thomas Macaulay brought back the prior freedom. After the uprising in 1857, there were changes to press freedom. The Vernacular Press Act, which was established in 1878 and was based on the Irish Press Laws, gave the government broad authority to regulate articles and editorials published in the vernacular press. The government began monitoring the local publications. The number of nationalist newspapers increased throughout India. When Punjabi rebels were expelled in 1907, Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote about them sympathetically in the book Kesari, which resulted in his arrest in 1908.

FAQs on Print Culture and the Modern World Class 10 History Notes Chapter 5

Q 1. What was the Print Revolution?

Answer-

The Print Revolution was more than simply a new technique of creating books; it changed people’s relationships with information and knowledge, as well as with institutions and authority.

Q 2. What does “censorship” mean?

Answer-

The suppression of opinions, conversations in public, or additional knowledge is known as censorship.

Q 3. What was the French Revolution?

Answer:

Historians claim that print culture provided the circumstances for the French Revolution.

Q 4. How to score well in History Class 10 Chapter 5?