Long-Distance Trade Routes

As humankind spread across the world, long-distance trade routes followed, connecting far-flung communities like lights strung over a darkened map. Studying these trade routes using these lessons and resources will help your students understand not only how commodities move, but also culture, as art, technology, and stories disperse throughout these economic webs.

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Lesson 8.1

Big History Project

Expansion & Interconnection

Exploration & Interconnection

The explorations of this period linked the world zones, and the exchange of ideas, people, diseases, plants, and animals resulted in profound global changes. From what people ate to the gods they prayed to—no area of life was unaffected.

From c. 1200 to 1450 CE, new networks of exchange—including the Silk Roads—crisscrossed Afro-Eurasia. Physical goods and intellectual and cultural “goods” reshaped social structures. Much changed because of these networks, but much remained the same.

Global Industrialization

Global industrialization didn’t happen all at once and it didn’t look the same everywhere. To one population, industrialization might have looked like glorious progress; to another, it might have appeared as the destruction of an entire culture.

Economic Interactions in an Age of Intense Globalization

Today’s global economy bears little resemblance to that of earlier centuries, and the allocation of power across the world reflects this new reality. China’s role as a dominant economic force is a key part of this story.

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Transoceanic Empires: Expansion and Resistance

Lesson 4.2

AP®

Transoceanic Interconnections

Transoceanic Empires: Expansion and Resistance

Maritime empires dominated much of the world from c. 1450 to 1750 CE. The expansion of these empires came at a great price: transatlantic slave trade, the disruption of economies, and the destruction of Indigenous peoples.

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Featured Materials

13th century Arab manuscript illustration depicting a merchant’s sailing dhow.

1200 to Present

Article

Indian Ocean Routes

From 1200 to 1450, the Indian Ocean was the center of world trade. Merchants from all over Eurasia, including the world’s largest empires, traded in this network.

1200 to Present

Video

World of Chaco

A thousand years ago, the Ancestral Pueblo made Chaco Canyon the center of their cultural world. Their networks stretched across the vast Colorado Plateau.

1200 to Present

Article

Zheng He (Graphic Biography)

Zheng He was the great admiral of the Ming Dynasty. Were his expeditions peaceful trade voyages or threatening campaigns of conquest and imperialism?

Sketch of the coast of Ghana with ships coming ashore

1200 to Present

Video

Impact of the Slave Trade: Through a Ghanaian Lens

How did the Atlantic slave trade impact Africa? We can study a smaller region to try to determine bigger answers.

Painting of women harvesting potatoes in Italy

1200 to Present

Article

Crops That Grew the World

After 1500, a biological exchange between the Old and New Worlds transformed global populations, trade networks, cultures, and environments.

1200 to Present

Activity

Our Interconnected World

In this activity, students will begin to understand how the world went from where it was in 1450 to how it is today.

1750 to Present

Article

Goods Across the World

From your phone to a cup of coffee, thousands of people around the world are part of the design, production, distribution, marketing, and support of things you use every day.

Long-Distance Trade Routes

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