Chapter 13

During the week of Thanksgiving, my world history class was supposed to read chapter 13 in Ways of the World. Worlds of the Fifteenth Century is the title for the chapter. In this chapter it speaks of the fifteenth century trying to refurnish the devastation left from the Mongols. As we can recall, the Mongols destroyed Europe and China leaving them with a broken civilization. In order to spring back up to their original society, they had to take new steps to achieve greatness. In the beginning of the fifteenth century the agriculture was the first to take rise. In North America, Africa, Amazon River Basin, and Southeast Asia settled small village-based communities to catch up on their revenue. All of these societies had no authority, forcing the unequal opportunities for different classes and sexes. To narrow it down I will focus first on the small village-based communities. To start off, in Mesopotamia, the city of Benin contained small highly centralized territorial states. Ewuare was the warrior who ruled Benin. He replaced the kinship with political authority, to sustain the society longer and to create order within the civilization. They were high in demand for trade, and Ewuare often ordered the people to make sculptures of Benin, which they are still known for today. Another civilization, located east of the Niger River settled the Igbo people. The book did not speak much of them but one interesting fact that I grasped was their idea on trade. The Igbo people refused to trade because they believed in their own kinship groups. The book referred to them as “stateless societies.” Within these two civilizations that I have mentioned: the Benin society and the Igbo people, they seem to have traded with themselves to create revenue for their societies. They also traded with Africa to provide their people with cotton cloth, fish, copper, iron, and decorative objects. They were both culturally unified, which means they practiced the same traditions and religions, and eventually they both discovered and practiced the trait of slave trade. In the Americas, the book focuses on the Iroquois civilizations, which is directed in now in the state of New York. The Iroquois people developed a full agriculture most likely due to the different lands they were surrounded by. They adopted maize and bean farming techniques that originated in the Americas. Agriculture was the primary economic activity that kept their civilizations alive and thriving.

The rest of the chapter discusses the similarities and differences in China and Europe. Their civilizations seemed to have more differences than similarities. For instance they took voyages for different reason. China took voyages for the distance, they took it as it is; whereas, Europe took voyages for a specific destinations. They look for regions or cultures to stop at. By both of their voyages, traditions and religions came back with them. This is what the Chapter 13 is mostly describing. It signifies the fourteenth centuries tragedies and eludes on the resurrection that the fifteenth century achieved. The fifteenth century was bringing back life to all of the civilizations. Without the hope that the people had during the fifteenth century, the world may have been a different place. We have to thankful for the success that the fifteenth century made.