Hi and welcome back to Heimler's History. In this video I'm going to help you review everything you need to know for Unit 2 of AP World History. And in order to do that we're going to compare the different intercontinental trade routes and then see what the Mongols had to do with all this business.
If you're ready, I'm ready. Let's get to it. So what were the similarities and differences in the different networks of exchange in the period 1200 to 1450? So glad you asked. But slow down, we need to figure out what networks of exchange we're actually talking about here.
The major trade routes you need to know for this period are as follows. The Silk Roads. the Indian Ocean Routes and the Trans-Saharan Network.
The Silk Roads connected China to Europe while passing through Central Asia and Southwest Asia. The Indian Ocean Network connected East Asia with East Africa and had Southeast Asia, South Asia and Southwest Asia all in between. The Trans-Saharan Routes connected North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin with Sub-Saharan Africa.
Okay, so now that we know what we're talking about, what was different and what was similar about these trade routes? And just for poops and giggles, let's start with similarities, and I will name three. First, the three major trade routes were similar because they depended in large part for their existence and their flourishing upon the established And probably the best example of this is when the Mongols controlled all the land across which the Silk Road stretched, but I get ahead of myself. We'll talk about them later. But the point is, when these trade routes were well protected by large states in cooperation with one another, merchants felt safe.
safe to travel there. And it's a big deal because when people feel safe they can start thinking about other things than their safety and in this case the other things that they started thinking about was new technology. All these trade routes gave birth to new technologies which helped them transport goods across them at a more efficient speed. New technologies like the magnetic compass, the latin sail, saddles for camels and horses, and the stern post rudder made trade along these routes far more manageable and profitable to boot.
A second similarity between all these three trade routes is what I'll call their primary purpose and their secondary consequences. Now it shouldn't surprise you that the primary purpose of these trade routes was trade. You got stuff, I got stuff, let's make a deal. But the secondary consequence of that particular interchange is that people from all parts of the known world came together and exchanged cultural goods.
For example, merchants often shared their religion among the people with whom they traded, but it wasn't only the merchants who were doing the proselytizing. As they say in England, That's as may be. But because these trade routes were so well established, missionaries from different faiths like Christianity and Islam and Buddhism took to the routes to bring their messages far and wide. And not only that, the introduction of new crops to new places was a big deal too.
Because of merchant contact, Champa rice was introduced to China and it was a strain of rice that was drought resistant and capable of several harvests a year. And that led to a population explosion in China. And let's not forget about bananas.
When Indonesian merchants introduced this new fruit to East African Bantu-speaking people, it led to large-scale migration of those people because now they could move to places that the banana grew instead of staying put where their staple crop, the yam, grew. Yam. Am I the only one who gets a great deal of pleasure out of saying that word?
Yam. Pro tip, if you're struggling with AP World History, just stop for a moment and say, Yam. That feels real good.
And the third similarity between these trading routes is that they caused the growth of trading cities. And if you think about it, If you think about the major trading routes as so many strings criss-crossing the world, then you will see that at some points those strings cross one another, and sometimes a lot of strings cross at one point. And in general, wherever you see those strings knot up pretty tightly, you've got a major trading city that grew up precisely because it was at the convergence of all of those routes.
Let me give you a couple of examples. The Silk Road Trade Network produced the commercial city of Shang An in China. The Indian Ocean Trade Routes produced Calicut in India and the Srivijaya Kingdom in Southeast Asia.
And the Trans-Saharan routes are responsible for the massive growth of Timbuktu and Mali. Okay, so those are some of the similarities between the different major trading routes, and on a macro level, they're basically all similarity. It's only when you zoom in, you can see the details of these things that really the differences start to show up. And let's look at those differences under three headings, goods, technology, and religion. These three major trading routes are different precisely because they specialized in carrying different kinds of goods.
They're different because each trading route had different conditions that required new technologies in order to facilitate trade. And in general, they're different because not the same religions traveled across each route. I'm feeling a chart. You want a chart?
Let's do a chart. In terms of goods, the Silk Roads mainly facilitated the trade of luxury goods like silk, porcelain, gunpowder, horses, and textiles. Across the Indian Ocean, more common goods were transported in addition to the luxury goods.
For example, gold, ivory, fruit, textiles, pepper, and rice. And the Trans-Saharan routes specialized in goods like horses, salt, gold, and slaves. In terms of technology, the Silk Roads gave birth to saddles, which helped merchants travel farther and bear heavier loads, and caravanserai, which were little travel stops spread out over about a day's travel so that merchants could stop and refresh themselves before moving on.
The Indian Ocean routes gave us new maritime technology. For example, they invented navigational aids like the astrolabe and the magnetic compass, and they also invented new ways to travel faster and with more precision like the stern post rudder and the latin sail and finally in terms of religion it'll be important for you to know which religions traveled along these routes along the silk roads buddhists brought their religion from south asia to east and southeast asia neo-confucianism traveled from china to japan korea and vietnam and Islam traveled from Southwest Asia to South Asia. Along the Indian Ocean routes, you've got the religions I just mentioned, but add to them Christianity from the Mediterranean basin. And along the Trans-Saharan routes, it was mostly Islam that traveled from Southwest Asia and North Africa down into Sub-Saharan Africa.
Alright, you didn't think that all these places that were deeply connected by trade weren't changed by that interconnectivity, did you? You so crazy. Now as I mentioned before, when merchants show up to a place, they are carrying way more than goods for trade.
So that means we need to consider the cultural and environmental consequences of this trade. First let's talk about cultural consequences. I already alluded to some of these changes when we talked about religion, but let's take a closer look.
Zen Buddhism was an innovation on Buddhism that originated in China and through trade spread to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. This was the Buddhism of the masses. And in China, even though a lot of the Confucian elite poo-pooed this new form of Buddhism, it was widely and eagerly embraced by the common folk. Another example is the conversion of the African Bantu-speaking tribes to Islam.
When Muslim merchants showed up on their shores, they found the Bantu very willing to convert to Islam. And a major consequence of that meeting was the birth of the Swahili language, which is a mixture of Arabic and Bantu. Another cultural consequence of trade was the opening of people's imaginations to places far beyond where they lived. And it was mainly- mainly travelers who were responsible for this, and maybe two of the most important are Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. Ibn Battuta was a Muslim who made it his ambition to travel all throughout Dar al-Islam, and he kept meticulous notes on the peoples with whom he interacted.
Marco Polo was an Italian traveler who found his way over to China and served for a time in the court of Kublai Khan, the emperor of the Yuan dynasty. When both of these traveler stories were published, the people who read them did so with great enthusiasm and found they had a desire for goods from those places and other things. Alright, what about the environmental consequences of trade?
Well I mentioned earlier the impact of Champa rice on China and bananas in Africa. But on the negative side, disease traveled through these routes as well, most notably the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague. And from what historians can tell, the Black Death began in China and spread all throughout Afro-Eurasia along trade routes.
And whenever this nasty bacteria showed up in a place, it was capable of wiping out significant portions of the population. And in some cases, the death toll was something like 75% of the population dead. And this transformed every place it touched, but it transformed Europe especially.
And the reason for that is because with all the working population severely diminished, all of a sudden the surviving workers found that they were in a position to negotiate for better wages and better working conditions. And we can't finish Unit 2 without talking about the Mongols. Arguably, they are the most significant pastoral people ever to take the stage in world history.
Starting in 1209 and stretching about 100 years forward, these folks were able to establish the largest land-based empire in history. Not bigger than the Romans. Yeah. Not bigger than the Greeks. Yeah.
Not bigger than the Persians. Oh yeah! So the Mongols began as a cluster of scattered tribes in the Mongolian steppe and it took the magnetic leadership of Genghis Khan to unite them and turn them into a fierce and brutal army bent on conquest. Their conquest began in China and then stretched far west. Now the Mongols had a reputation for brutality and it was well deserved.
But they're also a complicated bunch, those Mongols. It wasn't all brutality and in fact since they covered such a large portion of the world with their empire they were able to to establish what is known as the Pax Mongolica, or the Peace of the Mongols. And because of the security that was the result of that peace, trade flourished between the Middle East and Asia and Africa and Europe.
But as I mentioned before, one of the consequences of that revitalized trade was the quickening spread of the Black Death, and most historians give a healthy chunk of that responsibility to our friends the Mongols. Now the Mongols'cultural legacy was relatively minor. They left us no new religion, no economic structure, nothing like that.
But they did affect the formulation of states after their fall. What I mean is, one of the keys to the Mongolian success was the centralization of power. And after the fall of the Mongol Empire, many states in Asia and Europe and South Asia used the same techniques that the Mongols used.
to consolidate their own power. Alright, that was Unit 2 of AP World History. If your clicky finger is feeling good, then subscribe and join the Heimler's History family. If this was helpful to you in any way, then hit the like button and let me know. I'll see you later.