The Making of a Global World — Notes

Board scope: only the pre-modern world (this section and the next) and conquest, disease and trade (sections 3–4) are examined. Section 5 is for the interdisciplinary project.

The world has been tied together for thousands of years by people on the move: traders seeking profit, workers seeking a living, priests and pilgrims travelling for faith, scholars seeking knowledge, and people escaping persecution. They carried goods, money, skills, ideas and inventions, and also germs.

Early evidence

• About 3000 BCE: a coastal trade linked the Indus valley with present-day West Asia.
• Cowries (Indian Ocean seashells used as money) from the Maldives reached China and East Africa.
• Disease-carrying germs travelled long distances by at least the seventh century; by the thirteenth century the link with trade routes is clear.

The silk routes

• Not one road but several routes over land and by sea, joining Asia with Europe and northern Africa; in use from before the Christian Era almost until the fifteenth century.
• Named after Chinese silk carried west; Chinese pottery, and textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia, went the same way. Gold and silver flowed from Europe to Asia in return.
• Trade and culture moved together: Buddhism spread from eastern India through the routes' meeting points; early Christian missionaries and, later, Muslim preachers travelled them.

Food shows how cultures borrow from each other across great distances.

• Pasta: one story holds that Chinese noodles were carried west and turned into Italian spaghetti; or that Arab traders took pasta to Sicily in the fifth century. The exact route is uncertain.
• Foods from the Americas: potatoes, maize, tomatoes, chillies, groundnuts, soya and sweet potatoes were first grown by the original peoples of the Americas. Europe and Asia first met them only about five hundred years ago, reaching them only after Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492. Chillies are believed to have reached India with Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century.
• The potato gave Europe's poor a cheap, filling food: many were better fed and lived longer. But Ireland's poorest peasants came to depend on it almost entirely. When blight destroyed the crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands starved and many emigrated.

• In the sixteenth century European sailors found a sea route to Asia and crossed the Atlantic to the Americas.
• Before this, the Indian subcontinent was a central meeting point of Indian Ocean trade. European entry expanded some flows and redirected others towards Europe.
• The Americas had been cut off from the rest of the world for thousands of years. Their precious metals, especially silver, enlarged Europe's wealth and paid for its trade with Asia. Legends of El Dorado, a city of gold in South America, sent expedition after expedition looking for it.
• Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas was well under way by the mid-sixteenth century. It did not rest on firepower alone: the most decisive force was germs, above all smallpox. With no immunity after their long isolation, local peoples died in huge numbers; the disease often spread ahead of the Europeans and devastated communities. Guns could be captured and turned against invaders; disease could not.

• Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in Europe, cities were crowded and deadly diseases widespread, and religious dissenters were persecuted. Thousands left for America.
• Enslaved Africans, seized and shipped across the Atlantic, were forced to grow cotton and sugar on American plantations for buyers in Europe.
• Until well into the eighteenth century, China and India were among the richest countries and led Asian trade. From the fifteenth century China, by most accounts, turned away from overseas contact.
• China's reduced role and the rising importance of the Americas gradually moved the centre of world trade westwards; Europe became its centre.

Not assessed in the board exam.

• Three flows: trade (goods), labour (people) and capital (investment). About 50 million people left Europe for America and Australia in the nineteenth century.
• Britain abolished the Corn Laws (1846); cheap food imports followed and land was cleared abroad to grow grain for Britain. Railways, steamships, the telegraph and refrigerated ships carried goods.
• Rinderpest reached Africa in the late 1880s and killed about 90 per cent of cattle, pushing Africans into wage work.
• Indentured labour: workers from eastern UP, Bihar, central India and dry districts of Tamil Nadu went to Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam, Mauritius, Fiji, Ceylon and Malaya; abolished in 1921. Indian bankers and traders abroad: Shikaripuri shroffs, Nattukottai Chettiars, Hyderabadi Sindhi traders.
• Great Depression (about 1929 to mid-1930s): India's exports and imports nearly halved between 1928 and 1934; wheat prices fell by about half, while revenue demands stayed the same.
• Bretton Woods (July 1944): the IMF and the World Bank; fixed exchange rates with the dollar linked to gold. Newly independent countries later formed the Group of 77.