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Course: World History Project AP® > Unit 2
Lesson 1: 2.0—Unit 2 OverviewREAD: Unit 2 Introduction - Networks of Exchange 1200 to 1450
The production and distribution of things—food, tools, commodities, and luxuries—is a driving force in world history. Early in this era, networks of exchange allowed for the flow of goods across vast regions, with significant consequences for societies along these routes.
The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.
First read: preview and skimming for gist
Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.
Second read: key ideas and understanding content
Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.
By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:
- What evidence does the author provide to challenge the narrative that European peasants had miserable lives?
- What is an artisan and where were the largest centers of artisan production in 1200 CE?
- How does the author explain the existence of the merchant occupation?
- What are the economic, cultural, and biological consequences of long-distance trade described by the author?
Third read: evaluating and corroborating
Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.
At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:
- The author opens this article by suggesting that life for European peasants wasn’t all that bad, in part because they had access to new trade goods. Do you think that access to new types of goods was always good for common people? Can you think of any types of goods that might have made life worse for some people?
- In Unit 1, you explored the diversity of the global tapestry from 1200 to 1450 CE. Unit 2 covers the same period, but focuses more on the way diverse regions were connected. After reading this article, do you think it is useful to study the world by dividing it into separate cultural or geographic regions? Why or why not?
Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to these questions once you’ve finished reading.
Unit 2 Introduction: Networks of Exchange 1200 to 1450
By Trevor Getz
The production and distribution of things—food, tools, commodities, and luxuries—is a driving force in world history. Early in this era, networks of exchange allowed for the flow of goods across vast regions, with significant consequences for societies along these routes.
Pity the peasant
Pity the poor, thirteenth-century medieval European peasants. You may know them from the countless movies, comics, and books that depict them. They are eternally dirty and covered in lice and fleas that they share with the animals who also live in their houses. They wear rough woolen cloth, and barely have enough to eat. They are constantly working to grow food, and if the weather fails, they starve. Even if the harvest is good, some local nobleman rides down from his castle and takes whatever he wants. Life is boring, and unchanging. There’s nothing new happening, just the field to plow every day. With such grave depictions from Braveheart to Monty Python, it certainly looks like our lives are better than theirs.
Well... maybe. To be sure, there’s some evidence that some European peasants had it this bad. But there’s also a lot of evidence of something quite different. Peasants probably had lots of leisure time. Some, perhaps many, ate quite well. They had more holidays than we do—one survey suggests that in a number of medieval Christian communities, almost half of the year was taken up by holidays to celebrate saints. The thirteenth century was a period of increasing trade for Europe, with great new stuff coming in from other regions—like sugar from the Islamic world and pepper from Asia. We don’t have to romanticize this view to recognize that life for the medieval European peasant could be enjoyable as well as difficult.
The long, global history of production and trade
Humans are makers and humans are users. We have many strategies for making and getting the stuff we need to live, and the stuff we just want because it’s cool. Some of these strategies include making tools, while others involve organizing ourselves into groups. Arguably, the process of learning and adopting these strategies and practices is one of the driving forces of human history.
By 1200 CE, many people such as artisans specialized in the production of goods that were desired both within their communities and by those who lived thousands of miles away. We think the largest centers of artisanal production were in Asia—in particular East and South Asia. Both were places with booming economies that produced high quality, highly desirable goods. This desirability made possible another kind of occupation—the merchant, who bought products in one place and sold them in another.
Why did people need or want goods that were produced in distant regions? A few reasons. First, expertise is difficult to acquire. Video tutorials and how-to manuals were still centuries away, so the only way to learn a skill was to study under an expert, and that meant that technology and skills were often concentrated in one location. Similarly, raw materials like plants and minerals were often concentrated in just a few places, so finished goods were abundantly available right where they were made, keeping prices to buy them pretty low. In other areas, however, the same desirable goods might be rare and exotic enough to drive up prices faster than you can say “supply and demand”. The trick for the merchant was to carry goods from a place where prices were low to another place where prices were high due to that product’s scarcity.
Routes of exchange
In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a number of important, long-distance routes connected regions that produced different types of goods. These routes connected societies stretching from east to west along the Eurasian landmass. They’re often grouped together as the Silk Roads, because silk from East Asia was one of the most important products carried along them. Trade along the Silk Roads intensified in this period as demand rose for Chinese, Persian, and Indian goods in regions to the west. The stability provided by Mongol rule of Central Asia helped a lot, too, providing safety for travelers to encourage trade. This increase in traveling merchants helped spread technologies and culture across Eurasia.
A lot of trade in Afro-Eurasia was carried over water, and a particularly important maritime trading zone in this era was the Indian Ocean. Improved maritime technology and relatively predictable weather patterns meant that merchants in this region—whether from the Swahili Coast of East Africa, or Arabia, or the Mughal Empire and other states of South Asia, or even from the islands and peninsulas of Southeast Asia—could move around this sea in an annual cycle, bringing goods from one port to another.
Another maritime trading region was the Mediterranean Sea, whose small size meant that the North African, European, and Middle Eastern states that surrounded it were in constant contact with each other. Many of the goods that left North African ports actually came from farther south, across the Sahara Desert in the Sahelian zone of West Africa. There, expanding states like Mali and later Songhai helped merchants to collect, store, and ship goods—especially gold—across the desert in carefully organized caravans.
Long-distance trade routes had emerged in the Americas as well. In the Andes Mountains of South America, among the huge trading cities of Mesoamerica, and in the Mississippi River valley, three major trading systems moved goods across vast overland routes. Other, smaller maritime networks connected these three larger networks at times—huge canoes carried people along the shorelines and islands of the Caribbean. And in the Pacific Ocean, merchants moved goods along the west coast of South America and Mesoamerica. Merchants in the Western Hemisphere traded luxury goods like jade, turquoise, shells, and bright feathers as well as durable products like obsidian along these routes, responding to the growing demands of elite consumers and the needs of state governments.
Of course, a lot of trade routes were also shorter. A good example is the movement of English wool, which was turned into cloth in the nearby region of Flanders and then went on to provide clothing for people in many parts of Europe, but not much further. In this era, there were many trade routes around the world that were of this size, or even smaller
Connectivity and its consequences
It’s obvious that these trading connections made new goods and resources available to people in societies that were parts of these networks. Obsidian from one small part of Mesoamerica was turned into tools used by farmers and soldiers all around the region. West African gold provided currency for the economies of Christian and Islamic societies across Europe and the Middle East.
Chinese silk and English wool mingled in Europe, providing different kinds of clothing for different people and purposes. Trade also helped economies grow, providing jobs not only for merchants but for artisans in the societies that produced these goods.
Looking a little deeper, we can also see that these networks of connectivity had cultural impacts as well. Technologies travelled along the same routes as goods. The flood of Asian technologies into Europe in this period is a particularly important story, as game-changing innovations like the moldboard plow and new ideas helped European populations to increase and philosophies to flourish. Agricultural techniques and crops brought from one region to another through trade also altered environments and transformed societies. Indian Ocean traders from Southeast Asia carried bananas with them to East Africa. Eventually, states in the interior of Africa began cultivating bananas, which helped support new states and led to an increase in the population of this region.
But the trade routes carried deadly passengers as well, namely diseases. The Black Death (or bubonic plague) nearly wiped out trade along the Silk Roads and many other Afro-Eurasian trade routes beginning in the 1340s. Some routes only recovered in the early fifteenth century, by which time the system’s collapse had helped bring down the Mongol Empire. This change in the political map destabilized Central Asia, so now Europeans desiring Asia’s artisanal goods had to find another source. But that is a story we will pick up in the next unit.
Author bio
Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.