Ch. 8

Part Three: An Age of Accelerating Connections from 500-1500-Chapter 8 called Defining a Millennium, in Ways of the World, goes into detail how different cultures, religions, diseases, and trades spread through the world. The exchange in Eurasia diminished the economic self-stuffiness of local societies such as gatherer- hunterer people because more technology and a surplus of food started happening. They needed a new system to keep up with the speed of things. The trade shaped the peoples lives because it provided them with nutrition, jobs, housing, interaction, and revenue. In return it also had an effect on the societies as well such as the vast cultures, languages, religions, technology, plants, and politics.

            The Silk Roads in Eurasia connected the pastoral people with the agriculture people- example gatherer-hunterer. However after exchanging such goods, the location of the societies greatly mattered because lets say they traded maize. Maize can only grow on flat and dry lands; the rain forests would not be able to take ton the role of farming maize. So the trade of the people had to be decided before they do the exchange. The biggest trade that people seemed to do was the trade of silk, the book called it Silk Roads. The silk transferred from the east to west. Silk was in high demand for almost all societies. Silk resembled: high status, wealth, currency, and trade. Within the exchange of the good also provided the chance to expand religions such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Cultures were also affected in the trade of silk because it was past on from pastoral people to China, East and Central Asia, and India. What I found most interesting is when Eurasia would trade with Asia they picked up certain aspects of the Greeks. The book mentions that Buddha has similarities of the Greek gods. This made me shocked because I never put the two artworks together. I always thought they looked completely different but maybe because like the Greeks, Buddha actually has human characteristics; and at that time most all other artwork of civilizations had no human resemblance. Another thing that came with the opportunity to trade were the different diseases. The diseases followed the Eurasia route. I liked how the book put significance to the pros and cons of this exchange because it made you think in two ways. One aspect of the spread of diseases is that people saw a pattern in the diseases so they were able to find a mechanism to fix it; also, immunities started happening so that people got use to the sickness. But for the con side the book went into detail about different scenarios of the devastation the diseases caused such a the Bubonic Plague and the Black Death that hit the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty. In America their diseases affected their animals by domesticated animals due to the little interaction they had with the Eurasian Route.

            Sea Roads across the ocean were made mostly in the Indian Ocean. They were able to trade with Venice, Italy because of the water that surrounded the city. The trick they used to pick up speed was called monsoons. Monsoons are wind currents that people began to take advantage of the wind shifts. The trade made across the Global oceanic system established in1500 also impacted societies by cultures, especially the Greeks to India. The root religion practiced in Southeast Asia was Hinduism and Buddhism. Again India affecting the Greeks was a very odd fact for me because I never put these two civilizations together.