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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Explore the lesson plans

Exploration and Interconnection
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.
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Routes of Exchange
Lesson 2.3
1200 to Present
The Global Tapestry
Routes of Exchange
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.
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Global Industrialization
Lesson 3.2
1750 to Present
Industrialization
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.
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Economic Interactions in an Age of Intense Globalization
Lesson 9.3
1750 to Present
Globalization
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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