Introduction

The philosopher Stuart Hall once wrote that, “Instead of asking what are people’s roots, we ought to think about what are their routes, the different points by which they have come to be now; they are, in a sense, the sum of those differences.”

It’s a profound statement for historians, because it suggests that for us to know who we are today, we must know our pasts. But those pasts are not just a bunch of static places and times. They are about the way our ancestors traveled, and how that travel caused them to learn and change and grow. And those changes involved a lot of movement—of our ancestors themselves, of the food they ate, of the ideas that influenced them, of the technologies that they adapted to their use. And a lot of these changes took place between 1200 and 1750 CE, a period that we call “the first global age.”

To understand the “routes” our ancestors took in this era, this unit puts a lot of focus on one gigantic, big change right in the middle of our story—the so-called Columbian Exchange. Named after Christopher Columbus, the Columbian Exchange drew together two great hemispheres of the world—Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. But our story in this unit begins about 300 years before the voyages of Columbus. The Columbian Exchange was the result of long processes of regional interconnections as new routes emerged and old routes expanded around the world.

Land-based empires

We begin this unit in 1200 CE, as one of the largest empires of all time was developing: the Mongol Empire. The Mongols were an alliance of nomadic people from the steppes of Eurasia. Emerging from this region, they began their conquests between 1206 and 1294. During this period, they conquered much of Afro-Eurasia, and their expansion was only limited by military defeats at the edges of their empire in Central Europe, Japan, Vietnam, and Egypt.

There are two important reasons we start this unit with the Mongols. The first is that, partly through violent means, they created a peaceful trading zone across much of Afro-Eurasia in the thirteenth century. Their wars of conquest united most of the trading routes of the Silk Roads under one powerful empire, creating a zone in which merchants were protected from bandits. As a result, 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, a relative technological and economic backwater in the years before the rise of the Mongols, may have benefited most of all. The second reason the Mongols matter is that they created a model for later land-based empires, including the Ottoman, Safavid, Russian, and Mughal Empires, all of which had a huge impact on world history.

Regional webs before 1492

This unit is about the first global age. But at the start of this period, in 1200, the world had not yet become global. It was divided into several different—often overlapping—zones within the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. The Mongol’s huge trading zone intensified connections between several regional trading zones within Afro-Eurasia.

Artisans across Africa and Eurasia specialized in the production of goods like English wool, West African gold, and Chinese silk. These goods were purchased by merchants who carried them to nearby markets. Sometimes, particularly valuable goods were then picked up by another set of traders and taken even further away. These trading specialists included shipowners who had learned to navigate the Indian Ocean, caravan leaders who knew how to cross the Sahara desert, and long-distance merchants who negotiated with Mongol leaders to let them cross the vast expanse of that 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, sparking an exchange of culture and science that helped some societies rapidly increase their wealth and learning. Unfortunately, traders could also carry something less desirable—disease. Beginning in the 1340s, Afro-Eurasian trade networks were hit by one particular disease: 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 century that followed.

Meanwhile, extensive trade networks not connected to the Afro-Eurasian routes were developing elsewhere in the world. In the Americas, extensive trading included networks along the Andes Mountains, around the Caribbean, and in the region that is today Mexico and the US Southwest. In the Pacific Ocean, Polynesian navigators and shipbuilders voyaged thousands of miles across open ocean, connecting chains of islands and 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 and created a demand for luxury goods. Together, these new technologies and demands led people in Europe to build new kinds of ships and 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 actually the first person to journey from Afro-Eurasia to the Americas. However, the 1492 voyage that Columbus led resulted in the first sustained, ongoing connections linking the Americas and Afro-Eurasia. Over the next 300 years, merchants, colonizers, sailors, missionaries, and many other people would gradually knit together the whole world into one global zone of interaction.

We call the results of these connections the Columbian Exchange because they resulted in so 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, cassava, tomatoes, and chilis arrived in Afro-Eurasia. That’s right, Italian food before the fifteenth century had no tomatoes! Indian food didn’t have chili peppers! Similarly, staple foods such as bananas and herding animals like cows and sheep weren’t in the Americas before 1492.

A lot was being exchanged besides food. Some exchanges were environmental. 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 the vast, interconnected region of 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, while Native American knowledge flowed back to Europe. The result was a blending of ideas that changed many societies on both sides of the ocean.

The transatlantic slave trade

And, of course, the Columbian Exchange featured the movement of people. Over the next few centuries, millions of Europeans settled in the Americas, largely in regions where the local population had been devastated by diseases but also sometimes pushed out by violence.

Millions of Africans also arrived in the Americas over the centuries that followed. Most of them were brought by force, as enslaved people. They were seen by some Europeans as potential laborers who could be forced to mine the gold and harvest the wealth of the Americas. People from West Africa, in particular, were seen as desirable workers because they were from Afro-Eurasia and so had resistance to the diseases Europeans introduced to the Americas. In addition, West Africans were from tropical environments in Africa that resembled those in the Americas, where much of the wealth was concentrated. European settlers in the Americas in part justified enslaving people by applying new ideas about racial difference, ideas that made horrible and often deadly treatment acceptable. Yet, enslaved Africans weren’t simply victims. In every slaving region, people constantly resisted enslavement. Enslaved people used many different strategies to resist the brutality of enslavement, fight for freedom, and create new communities in the Americas where they and their children could survive and thrive.

New economic systems

The transatlantic slaving system, along with the settlement of the Americas, were two new of institutions that were quite different from the land-based empires and trading networks of the Mongol era.

The first institution was the start of an economic system that we call capitalism. Trading long distances, especially across the sea, is very expensive—and very risky. Europeans who wanted to do this kind of trade adopted new types of organizing to pool their money for these ventures. This money could pay for new ships and trade goods. Sometimes, it paid for guns to conquer territories and enslave people, as well. Because money was pooled by different investors, the risk of one person or business losing all their money on one failed venture decreased. That made more people willing to invest their money in funding trading voyages.

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

Together, these two institutions—capitalism and oceanic empires—directed the routes many of our ancestors moved along, especially for those of us whose ancestors crossed the oceans, voluntarily or by force, in this first global era.