Silk Road and Indian Ocean Trade I

Lecture Notes

Today's lecture examines the two main long-distance trade routes of the pre-modern world. The first is the Silk Road, an overland caravan network which crisscrossed the Asian continent from China to the Levant (on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea); the second is the Indian Ocean maritime routes which linked the "Spice Islands" in South East Asia to India and Eastern Africa. The argument to keep in mind throughout this lecture is that these trade networks allowed for almost world-wide contact and interactions among peoples who otherwise probably would not have even hear about each other. In other words, these trade networks allowed for a degree of globalization in the age prior to "Globalization", with a capital g, as we think of it in the modern world. In the following slides I will discuss not only the nature of the networks and the routes these networks followed, but also the goods exchanged, highlighting both the trading of merchandise such as silk, spices, and precious metals, and the exchanging of peoples and ideas.