Week #4: Fascination of Trade

Trade. Now that I think about it, I feel a bit silly to see how narrow minded my perceptions of trade were before reading our text. Before hand I thought about trade as a means of exchanging goods from different parts of the world. I realized that these exchanges were more than just exchanges of goods, it was also a means of exchanges of Ideas.

I found it interesting to read that trade diminished the economic self sufficiency of local societies. I figured that this was so due to the need to obtain new goods from neighbors. Once people settled, in order to survive  people would have to make the most of a small piece of land to cultivate what they needed to survive. However, even cultivating your own food was a milestone considering that people had to travel many times to continue surviving. I imagine that when trade emerged people got happy to see the convenience of trade, having people come to you with all these goods was great, not only could you stay near your home, but you could get things you once traveled for.

 I realized that trade also made a means for economic  opportunity for some. While some were making money producing the goods demanded by neighbors, others decided to be the ones to take the goods. I would like to believe that it was these people, the ones willing to spread the goods to new areas who are responsible for taking not only new products to unknown lands but also bits and pieces of cultures. One of the things that impressed me was reading about incense in the book and realizing that it was due to trade that it later made it into the bible. Disease was also spread through taking new products for trade. This reminded me of the later historical conquest of the americas where the spanish took diseases but I never made the connection to diseases being carried earlier in history. It makes sense to think that people of a given area are immune to certain diseases due to that being the area where they reside, but when new humans came into contact with it, they could not withstand the disease. I later noticed that our text mentioned that Europeans had an advantage when they confronted peoples of the Western Hemisphere due to the exposure they had gained over time due to Eurasian diseases. I realize that as aforementioned, this could be the reason that Europeans survived their later encounter with the peoples of the Americas.

Lastly, the idea of trading across the ocean. I was honestly impressed on how technological people were, they figured out ways to trade things from Italy to China. There was a whole system developed for transport as people imported goods from one area and resold them in another. Impressively enough people also learned the patterns of the sea, developing new technologies  such as ways to calculate latitude (which by the way with our current technology I don’t think I would be able to do), a compass (which we still use today) sails and ships that were more conducive to trade. As I read this second I was just dumbfounded by how quickly all these events took place and was impressed by the immense impact that this would have on later historical events.