Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Silk Road and Indian Ocean
The Silk Road, as described in Bulliet, may be viewed as the world's first system of globalization- merchants would bring into cities, along with their merchandise, knowledge and news. In this manner, religion, science, and technology rapidly progressed. Regardless of the rise and fall of empires, the demand for goods was unaffected; thus, the traveling merchant class remained constant. The Indian Ocean Maritime System was an aquatic extension of the Silk Road- it forged faster and more convenient trade routes between nations, which allowed for further exchange of knowledge and culture. The merchant class was, in many Asian societies, ranked lowly due to the penny-pinching nature of their profession. However, I see them as the greatest educators in early civilizations. Their profession made the world smaller and allows humankind to progress faster, as a unit.
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Hey Steph sorry to do this to you but below is my response to the prompt.
ReplyDeleteEver since humans have desired resources beyond those immediately available to them, they have consistently faced two distinct choices: invade new lands in hopes of acquiring said resource, or trade someone for it. The initial reaction to this trade or raid dilemma most likely reveals much about the culture of an individual. But from the fourth century B.C.E. to the seventh century C.E., the Indo-European world united together to form the complex system of long distance trade referred to by modern historians as the Silk Road. This ancient highway that connected east and west- and arguably would set the foundation for the escalation of the Black Death to Pandemic proportions- acted nearly as a Classical Era stock market. European merchants infused capital they earned in transactions with their counterparts from empires thousands of miles away and introduced their countrymen and women to the world’s largest continent. As Lord Cutler Beckett foretold in Pirates of the Caribbean, the blank edges of the map were beginning to be filled in.
Speaking of seafaring adventures, The Indian Ocean Maritime System acted throughout this time as an ocean-based counterpart to the Silk Road. Here, the differing technologies of the time (as describes our textbook on P. 207) made themselves readily apparent. The square-sailed and occasionally oar-powered triremes of the Greeks and the and the triangular-sailed ships that navigated the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean highlighted the different technological places that these two groups of civilizations inhabited. To me, these differences show how different inherited climates can drive similarly minded people to widely ranged outcomes. When the European Imperialists tried to impose their ways on essentially the rest of the world during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries they incorrectly believed that because their technology was different than the natives of Africa or Asia that it was inherently better. I would beg to differ. I believe that the technology a successful civilization produces shows how they react to and try to manipulate their unique environment. Perhaps this is something worth recalling in an increasingly economically stratified world.