Networks of exchange · AP World History: Modern

Unit 2 · Networks of exchange

c. 1200–1450

Between about 1200 and 1450 three great networks carried more goods, people and ideas farther than ever before: the overland Silk Roads across Central Asia, the sea lanes of the Indian Ocean, and the caravan routes across the Sahara. For a century the Mongol Empire joined much of Eurasia under one rule.

The unit has three big ideas. First, improved transportation technologies and commercial practices (caravanserais, credit and paper money, the compass and bigger ships, the camel saddle) increased the volume of trade and widened its reach, and the expansion of empires, the Mongols above all, made it safer. Second, trade had consequences: states grew rich on it, merchants settled in foreign ports, and religions, technologies, crops and diseases traveled with the goods. Third, the networks can be compared: what they carried, how, and who gained.

Most of what moved was luxury goods, light and valuable enough to repay a long journey: silk and cotton cloth, porcelain, spices, precious metals and gems, and enslaved people. Few merchants traveled a whole route; goods passed from hand to hand, market to market.

The figure is Afro-Eurasia with the three networks on it: red the Silk Roads, blue the Indian Ocean, gray the trans-Saharan routes. Caravans and ships go out and back along each; a camel’s red load is heading west or north (silk, gold), its blue load east or south (silver, salt).

topic
2.1	The Silk Roads
2.2	The Mongol Empire and the making of the modern world
2.3	Exchange in the Indian Ocean
2.4	Trans-Saharan trade routes
2.5	Cultural consequences of connectivity
2.6	Environmental consequences of connectivity
2.7	Comparison of economic exchange

Unit 2 is about 8–10% of the AP exam.

2.1 · The Silk Roads

caravans across Central Asia

The Silk Roads were not one road but a web of caravan routes linking China, Central Asia, Persia and the Mediterranean. After 1200 they carried more than ever, because commercial practices and transportation technologies improved and because demand for luxury goods grew across Afro-Eurasia.

Technologies and practices. Caravanserais, walled inns about a day’s travel (30–40 km) apart, gave caravans water, food, shelter and a market. Bactrian camels, which carry roughly 150–250 kg (estimates vary), crossed the deserts and passes. Merchants trusted forms of credit: China’s “flying cash,” deposit certificates from the 800s; the bills of exchange and cheques (sakk) of Muslim merchants, paid in another city; and Italian banking houses. A money economy spread: Song China issued the first government paper money (from 1024), and the Mongol Yuan made paper notes its currency from 1260.

Goods. Demand for luxuries set the trade. Chinese, Persian and Indian artisans and merchants expanded their production of textiles and porcelain for export, and Song China’s output of iron and steel grew. Light, valuable goods paid for the journey; bulky ones did not.

westward	eastward
silk, porcelain, paper, tea	horses, silver, glass, wool and cotton cloth

Effects. Trade made trading cities rich: oases such as Kashgar, where routes round the Taklamakan desert met, and Samarkand and Bukhara in Central Asia. When the Mongols ruled the whole route, from the 1250s to the 1350s, merchants crossed it in more safety than before or after, and the Silk Roads reached their height. The route drawn from Chang’an to Constantinople is about 7,600 km; few merchants went the whole way. Italian merchants from Venice and Genoa met the caravans at the Black Sea and the Levant.

The figure follows the caravans: red loads westward, blue eastward, past caravanserais and the trading cities.

2.2 · The Mongol Empire and the making of the modern world

conquest, then connection

In 1206 a Mongol chief, Temüjin, was proclaimed Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. In about seventy years his armies and his heirs’ had built the largest contiguous land empire in history, about 23–24 million km², and joined China, Central Asia, Persia and the Rus’ under one family’s rule.

How they conquered. Mounted archers, each with several horses, moved faster than any rival. Armies were organized in units of 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000, promoted by merit, and fed by intelligence on their enemies. Engineers from China and Persia built siege engines. Cities that surrendered were usually spared; cities that resisted, such as Merv, Nishapur and Baghdad, were destroyed as a warning.

years	conquest
1209–1227	the Tangut kingdom of Xi Xia
1211–1234	the Jin of north China (Zhongdu, Beijing, fell 1215)
1219–1221	Khwarazm in Central Asia (Bukhara and Samarkand, 1220)
1236–1241	the steppe and the Rus’ (Kyiv, 1240); raids into Poland and Hungary (1241)
1258	Baghdad sacked by Hülegü: the Abbasid caliphate ends
1268–1279	the Southern Song, by Kublai Khan

Limits. The Mamluks of Egypt beat the Mongols at Ain Jalut (1260); invasions of Japan (1274 and 1281) were wrecked by storms and resistance; Đại Việt and the Delhi Sultanate held them off. After 1260 a succession war split the empire into four khanates:

khanate	ruled	end
Yuan dynasty	China, Mongolia, Korea (a vassal), Tibet	1368 (driven from China by the Ming)
Chagatai Khanate	Central Asia	split in the 1340s; its east lasted into the 1600s
Ilkhanate	Persia, Iraq, the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia	broke up after 1335
Golden Horde	the western steppe; the Rus’ princes paid it tribute	1502

The making of the modern world. Mongol rule (the Pax Mongolica) protected merchants, lent them capital, and ran the yam, relay stations with fresh horses for messengers; a metal pass, the paiza, gave safe conduct. The Mongols moved artisans, scholars and officials from one end of the empire to the other, and technological and cultural transfers followed: the Mongols wrote their language in the Uyghur script; Hülegü founded an observatory at Maragha (1259) where Persian and Chinese astronomers worked; Greek and Islamic medical knowledge reached western Europe; numbering systems, Hindu–Arabic numerals with zero, spread to Europe. Rulers adopted local faiths: the Ilkhans became Muslim (Ghazan, 1295), the Yuan favored Tibetan Buddhism.

The cost was enormous: millions killed, irrigation works in Persia and Iraq wrecked. And the routes that carried silk also carried plague (2.6). The Ilkhanate broke up after 1335, and the Ming drove the Yuan out of China in 1368.

The figure runs from 1200 to 1300: Mongol rule (red) spreads campaign by campaign, then stands at four heights, one per khanate; blue the states that held the Mongols off.

2.3 · Exchange in the Indian Ocean

riding the monsoons

The Indian Ocean was the largest network of all. Its sailors knew the monsoon: from about June to September the wind blows from the southwest, from about December to March from the northeast. A ship could sail to India or China on one monsoon and home on the next.

Technologies. The magnetic compass, used for navigation in Song China by the early 1100s; the astrolabe, refined by Muslim scholars, for finding latitude; Arab dhows with lateen sails and sewn planks; and Chinese junks, large ships with several masts, stern-post rudders and watertight compartments, which could carry bulk cargo as well as luxuries.

from	goods
East Africa	gold (from Great Zimbabwe), ivory, enslaved people, timber
Arabia, Persia	horses, frankincense, pearls
India	cotton textiles (Gujarat), pepper (Malabar), gems
Southeast Asia	cloves, nutmeg and other spices; tin
China	porcelain, silk, iron goods

Diasporic communities. Because merchants waited months for the wind to turn, many settled abroad and married locally: Arab and Persian merchants in East African ports, Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia, Muslim merchants in Quanzhou and Calicut, Gujaratis in Malacca, Jewish merchants from Cairo to India. They carried their faiths and customs with them; Islam spread along the coasts this way.

States that grew with the trade. The Swahili city-states of the East African coast, Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi and Mogadishu, grew rich exporting gold and ivory; their language, Swahili, is Bantu with many Arabic words, and their rulers were Muslim. Inland, Great Zimbabwe (1200–1450), a city of stone walls of perhaps 10,000 or more people, sent its gold to the coast. Gujarat sold cotton cloth across the ocean. The Sultanate of Malacca, founded about 1400, controlled the strait between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea and grew rich taxing the ships that passed.

Zheng He. The Ming emperor Yongle sent the admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch, on 7 voyages (1405–1433) to Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and East Africa. The first fleet had, by the official history, 62 great “treasure ships” and about 27,800 men. The voyages displayed Ming power and enrolled states in China’s tributary system; they founded no colonies. After 1433 the Ming, facing the Mongols on their northern frontier and the cost, stopped them.

The figure runs through a year: the monsoon arrows swing round, merchant ships (red) sail north-east on the summer monsoon and back on the winter one; blue Zheng He’s fleet; gray the states that grew with the trade.

2.4 · Trans-Saharan trade routes

gold north, salt south

Camel caravans crossed the Sahara between the towns of North Africa and the Sahel, the grassland on its southern edge. The trade made West African kingdoms rich, above all the Mali Empire.

Technologies. The camel, which can go days without water, and the camel saddle, which let a rider carry heavy loads and fight from its back, made the crossing possible. Merchants traveled in caravans, often of hundreds of camels, guided by Berber nomads from oasis to oasis.

north across the Sahara	south across the Sahara
gold, ivory, enslaved people, kola nuts	salt, copper, horses, cloth, books

West Africa had gold, from the fields of Bambuk and Bure, but little salt, which people need in a hot climate; the desert had salt, mined in slabs at Taghaza. North Africa and Europe wanted gold for coins.

The growth of Mali. Sundiata Keita defeated the Sosso at Kirina (c. 1235) and founded Mali. Its rulers (mansas) controlled the goldfields and the Niger trade towns, Timbuktu, Djenné and, from about 1325, Gao, and taxed the gold, salt and copper that passed through. The mansas were Muslim, which tied them to North African merchants and scholars; most of their subjects kept older beliefs.

Mansa Musa (reigned c. 1312–1337; dates vary) made the hajj to Mecca in 1324–1325 with a huge caravan. In Cairo he gave away and spent so much gold that, the Arab scholar al-Umari wrote some twelve years later, its value there had not recovered. He came home with scholars and an architect; Timbuktu’s Djinguereber Mosque dates from 1327, and the city became a center of Islamic learning. A European map, the Catalan Atlas (1375), shows him holding a nugget of gold. Ibn Battuta visited Mali in 1352–1353. In the 1400s Mali weakened, and Songhai, centered on Gao, took its place.

The figure runs from 1220: Mali (red) spreads from Niani; caravans carry gold north (red loads) and salt south (blue); Mansa Musa’s route to Mecca draws as the year reaches 1324 (the exact route is not known).

2.5 · Cultural consequences of connectivity

faiths, ideas and travelers

Goods were not all that moved. Merchants, pilgrims, missionaries and scholars carried religions, technologies, literary and artistic traditions along the same routes, and some cities grew rich and large as meeting points.

Religions. Buddhism continued to shape East Asia: Zen (Chan) took root in Japan from the 1190s. Hinduism and Buddhism shaped Southeast Asia, where Angkor Wat was built as a Hindu temple in the 1100s and later became Buddhist. Islam spread into sub-Saharan Africa (Mali, the Swahili coast) and Southeast Asia (Sumatra by the 1290s, Malacca in the 1400s), carried by merchants and Sufi teachers more than by conquest.

Science and technology. Muslim scholars built on Greek and Indian mathematics, including the Indian numerals and zero. Greek science and philosophy returned to western Europe through Muslim al-Andalus (Spain), where texts were translated into Latin, as at Toledo. Paper, printing and gunpowder spread from East Asia into the Islamic world and Europe: a gunpowder recipe appears in Europe by 1267 and a picture of a cannon by 1326.

Art. Under the Mongols, Persian painters took up Chinese styles; Chinese potters at Jingdezhen painted porcelain with cobalt blue from Persia, the blue-and-white that was then shipped back to the Islamic world.

traveler	journeys	left us
Ibn Battuta, from Tangier	1325–1354	the Rihla, dictated to Ibn Juzayy, 1355
Marco Polo, from Venice	1271–1295	his Travels, told to Rustichello of Pisa in a Genoese prison, about 1298
Margery Kempe, from King’s Lynn	1413–1415	The Book of Margery Kempe, dictated in the 1430s

Travelers show how connected the world was. Ibn Battuta, a Muslim judge from Tangier, traveled about 120,000 km (estimates vary) through the Dar al-Islam, from Mali to China, working as a judge in Delhi and the Maldives: everywhere he found Muslim communities, Islamic law and Arabic. Marco Polo, a Venetian, served Kublai Khan for some seventeen years; his book made Europeans curious about Asia’s wealth (some historians doubt parts of it). Margery Kempe, an English Christian mystic, made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela; her book is often called the first autobiography in English.

The figure draws the three journeys in turn: red Ibn Battuta, blue Marco Polo, gray Margery Kempe.

2.6 · Environmental consequences of connectivity

crops and the Black Death

Along the trade routes moved crops, which let farmers feed more people, and pathogens, which killed them. Both changed the size of whole populations.

Crops. Champa rice, from Champa in present-day Vietnam, ripened fast and stood up to drought; the Song emperor Zhenzong had its seed spread through the Yangtze valley in 1012. With two harvests a year in the south, China’s population passed 100 million (estimates vary). Bananas, from Southeast Asia, had crossed the Indian Ocean to East Africa and spread inland, where they fed growing farming populations. Citrus, sour oranges, lemons and limes, was carried west by Muslim farmers and traders to Sicily and al-Andalus, part of a wider spread of crops and irrigation in the Islamic world.

The Black Death. Bubonic plague is caused by a bacterium carried by fleas on rodents; in the lungs it spreads from person to person. DNA from graves near Lake Issyk-Kul, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, dated 1338–1339, points to an origin in Central Asia. It traveled west along Mongol trade routes to the Golden Horde, and in 1346 reached Caffa, a Genoese port in Crimea. Genoese ships carried it to Constantinople, Sicily and Egypt in 1347; by 1353 it had crossed Europe to Moscow.

region	reached
near Lake Issyk-Kul	1338
Caffa, in Crimea	1346
Constantinople and the Balkans	1347
Sicily and Italy	1347
Egypt	1347
England and Ireland	1348
Norway and Sweden	1349
Poland, the Baltic and the Rus’	1350

The toll. Europe lost between a third and a half (some estimates reach 60%) of its people between 1347 and 1351; Egypt and Syria perhaps about a third (estimates vary). Plague returned every few decades. Effects: with fewer workers, wages rose and peasants demanded more, as in the French Jacquerie (1358) and the English Peasants’ Revolt (1381); serfdom weakened in western Europe; Jews were blamed and massacred in many towns; trade fell, and the weakened Mongol khanates broke apart.

The figure runs from 1336 to 1354: the plague (red) spreads region by region, dated where it arrived; blue the routes by which Champa rice, bananas and citrus spread.

2.7 · Comparison of economic exchange

three networks side by side

Comparing means naming similarities and differences and explaining them. The three networks of 1200–1450 were alike in what drove them and different in how they worked.

	Silk Roads	Indian Ocean	trans-Saharan
carried by	camel and horse caravans	dhows and junks, on the monsoon winds	camel caravans
technology	caravanserai, paper money, bills of exchange	compass, astrolabe, lateen sails, junks with rudders and bulkheads	the camel saddle
goods	silk, porcelain, horses, silver	textiles, spices, porcelain, gold, ivory, timber, rice	gold, salt, ivory, enslaved people
states that grew	the Mongol khanates; Venice and Genoa	Swahili city-states, Gujarat, Malacca	Mali (later Songhai)
what spread	Buddhism, Islam, paper, gunpowder, the plague	Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, merchant diasporas	Islam and Arabic learning

Similarities. All three grew because of new technologies adapted to their environments (the camel saddle, the caravanserai, the compass and the monsoon) and new commercial practices such as credit. All carried mostly luxury goods for elites. Merchants, not governments, did most of the trading, but states grew rich by protecting and taxing it: the Mongols, Mali, Malacca, the Swahili cities. All spread Islam, which gave merchants a shared law, language and trust from West Africa to Southeast Asia, and all carried crops and disease.

Differences. Volume: a ship carried far more than a caravan, so the Indian Ocean also moved bulk goods (cloth, timber, rice) and was the largest network. Dependence on empire: the Silk Roads flourished under one power, the Mongols, and declined when the khanates broke up and plague struck; no single empire controlled the Indian Ocean (Zheng He’s voyages were a brief exception); the trans-Saharan trade was bound up with one state, Mali, whose rulers taxed its gold and salt. Environment: steppe and desert by camel, open sea by the wind.

Continuity and change. Over the period the volume of trade and the range of the networks grew, carried by older routes and new practices. After 1450 the Ottomans sat across the land routes, and in 1498 a Portuguese fleet reached India round Africa: Unit 4 begins there.

The figure is the period on one strip: events appear as the year reaches them, the Mongols’ and the Silk Roads’ (red) above it, the Indian Ocean’s (blue), the Sahara’s (gray) and those of travel, plague and ideas (black) below; the bars are the Pax Mongolica, Mali, the Black Death and Zheng He’s voyages.