Introduction

The philosopher Stuart Hall wrote that, “Instead of asking what are people’s roots, we ought to think about what are their routes.” For us to know who we are today, we must know our pasts. Those pasts include the way our ancestors traveled, and how that travel caused them to learn and change and grow. Those changes involved a lot of movement. Our ancestors moved. The food they ate moved. The ideas that influenced them moved. The technologies that they adapted to their use moved. A lot of these changes took place between 1200 and 1750 CE. We call this period “the first global age.”

To understand the “routes” our ancestors took in this time, this unit focuses on one big change right in the middle of our story—the Columbian Exchange. It is named after Christopher Columbus. The Columbian Exchange brought together Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. But our story begins about 300 years before the voyages of Columbus. The Columbian Exchange was the result of long processes of regional interconnections. New routes emerged. Old routes expanded around the world.

Land-based empires

We begin this unit in 1200 CE. One of the largest empires of all time was developing: the Mongol Empire. The Mongols were nomadic people from the large areas of flat unforested grassland in southeastern Eurasia. They began their conquests between 1206 and 1294. During this period, they conquered much of Afro-Eurasia. Their expansion was only limited by defeats at the edges of their empire in Central Europe, Japan, Vietnam, and Egypt.

We start this unit with the Mongols. This is for two important reasons. The first is that they created a peaceful trading zone across Afro-Eurasia in the 1200s. Their wars of conquest united most of the trading routes of the Silk Roads under one strong empire. This created an area where merchants were protected from bandits. People, ideas, goods, and technologies moved safely from China to Europe and the Islamic World, and back. Each of these regions benefited from the flow of trade goods and new ideas. Europe was behind technologically and economically in the years before the rise of the Mongols. It may have benefited most of all. The second reason the Mongols matter is that they created a model for later empires that had a huge impact on world history.

Regional webs before 1492

This unit is about the first global age. This period started in 1200. The world had not yet become global. It was divided into several different zones. They often overlapped. These zones were within the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. The Mongol’s huge trading zone strengthened connections between several regional trading zones within Afro-Eurasia.

Goods like English wool, West African gold, and Chinese silk were first sold locally. Then they were picked up by other traders and taken even further away. They included shipowners who had learned to sail the Indian Ocean. They included caravan leaders who knew how to cross the Sahara desert. Also included were merchants who negotiated with Mongol leaders. They gained the right to cross that huge empire on camels and horses.

The merchants carried trade goods. But their travels also brought books and other tools of learning from one place to another. This sparked an exchange of culture and science that helped some societies quickly increase their wealth and learning. Unfortunately, traders could also carry something bad. They carried disease. Beginning in the 1340s, Afro-Eurasian trade networks were hit by one particular disease. It was the bubonic plague, or Black Death. The results were devastating and contributed to the collapse of the Mongol Empire. However, Afro-Eurasian trade routes recovered in the 100 years that followed.

Meanwhile, other extensive trade networks were developing elsewhere in the world. These included networks along the Andes Mountains in South America. There were routes around the Caribbean. Other routes developed in Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Polynesian navigators and shipbuilders voyaged thousands of miles across open ocean in the Pacific. These networks connected people across vast distances.

The trading system of Afro-Eurasia produced a particularly important development that helped create the first global age. Trade along these routes brought together the technologies of shipbuilding and navigation from many places. It created a demand for luxury goods. Together, these new technologies and demands led people in Europe to build new kinds of ships. They led them to sail in search of new routes to the markets of Asia. Along the way, they ran into the Americas.

The Columbian Exchange

Christopher Columbus was not the first person to travel from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas. However, the 1492 voyage that Columbus led resulted in the first connections linking the Americas and Afro-Eurasia. Merchants, colonizers, sailors, missionaries, and many other people would gradually bring together the whole world. Over the next 300 years, this created one global zone of interaction.

We call the results of these connections the Columbian Exchange. They resulted in much being exchanged or moved between continents and across oceans. We can start with food. In the Columbian Exchange, American crops such as maize (corn), potatoes, tomatoes, and chilis arrived in Afro-Eurasia. Similarly, foods such as bananas and animals like cows and sheep weren’t in the Americas before 1492.

A lot was being exchanged besides food. For example, many native plants in the Americas were overwhelmed by weeds, crops, and grazing animals that Europeans brought with them. Then there were the health changes. Diseases that had developed in Afro-Eurasia hit communities in the Americas that had not developed resistance. Ideas also moved along these new routes. Religions like Christianity and Islam arrived in the Americas. Indigenous knowledge flowed back to Europe. The result was a blending of ideas that changed societies on both sides of the ocean.

The transatlantic slave trade

The Columbian Exchange also featured the movement of people. Over the next few centuries, millions of Europeans settled in the Americas.

Millions of Africans also arrived in the Americas over the centuries that followed. Most of them were brought by force. They were enslaved people.

New economic systems

The transatlantic enslavement system and the settlement of the Americas brought two new institutions. They were quite different from the land-based empires and trading networks of the Mongol era.

The first institution was the economic system that we call capitalism. Trading long distances is very expensive. It is very risky. Europeans who wanted to do this kind of trade pooled their money for these ventures. Because money was put in by different investors, there was less risk of one person or business losing all their money on one failed venture. That made more people willing to invest in trading voyages.

The second institution was the oceanic empire. Land-based empires had existed for centuries in the Americas and Afro-Eurasia. This new type of empire connected territories across oceans. It relied on taking wealth and natural resources out of distant colonies to fund the expansion of the empire to new overseas colonies.

Capitalism and oceanic empires directed the routes many of our ancestors moved along. This is especially true of those of us whose ancestors crossed the oceans in this first global era.