Chapter 1 The Material and Trading Worlds, circa 1400

Afro Eurasian

The ________ system circa 1300 is called a ‘ ‘ world system not because it literally spanned the entire globe, but because it was greater than any one given part.

Humans

________ get their nitrogen by consuming plants or animal protein.

Diet

________ and caloric intake, along with epidemic disease, famine, war, and other disasters, kept human life expectancy much shorter than it is today.

Agriculture

________ provided not only food for the entire society, but most of the raw materials for whatever industry there was, especially textiles for clothing.

Food shortages

________, dearth, and famine were an all- too- real part of life for people in 1400.

1300s

The mid- to late ________ constituted a serious crisis in world history.

human numbers

An increase in ________ is an indication of our species success in obtaining greater food energy from the ecosystem.

Mexico

In ________, nearly 90 % of the population (twenty- five million) succumbed to European diseases (smallpox and influenza)

Population growth

________ and decline each brought certain benefits and difficulties to a society.

bubonic plague

The ________, killed tens of millions of people in the mid- 1300s.

rough indicator of wealth

Towns and cities can be used as a(n) ________.

China

In ________, tigers at one time inhabited most of the region and periodically attacked Chinese villages and cities, carrying away piglets and babies alike when humans disrupted their ecosystem by cutting away the forests that provided them with their favored game, deer or wild boar.

Nomads

________ were not the only ones to challenge the civilizations, there were other groups, who, unlike the ________ were often quite self- sufficient and could obtain everything they needed from their environment.

fourteenth century

During the ________, the Old World was connected by eight interlinking trading zones within three great subsystems.

Wolves

________ roamed throughout most of Europe, as can be attested by Grimms Fairy Tales, packs of wolves entered the cities as they did in Paris in 1420 and 1438.

agrarian world

The ________ was not made by the ruling elites, but as a result of the interactions, understandings, and agreements among state agents, landowners, and rural peasant producers.

Agricultural advances

________ made possible ever- greater amounts of food than the direct producers could consume in any given year, in other words, an ‘ ‘ agricultural surplus.

cultural structures

The world is composed of social, economic, political, and ________.

success of humans

The number of people existing on the earth is an indicator of the ________ in creating material conditions.

bubonic plague

The ________ is a result of a bacillus, that is, a disease- producing bacterium (Yersinia pestis), that a 2013 study shows exploded.

Population growth

________ could accompany improving conditions and rising standards of living for most people.

To those within the centers of the civilization, these nomads appeared to be the opposite of civilized

they were illiterate, and probably superstitious as well

Nonetheless, the relationship between the two populations clearly was inverse

the more people, the less wildlife

A growing human population requires additional food and energy supplies to support it, those increases could come from but three sources

bringing more land under cultivation, increasing the labor inputs on a given plot of land, or increasing the amount of water or fertilizer

The world in the fourteenth century thus was polycentric

it contained several regional systems, each with its own densely populated and wealthy ‘‘core,

The Black Death

A Mid-Fourteenth-Century Conjuncture

The mid

to late 1300s constituted a serious crisis in world history

Conclusion

The Biological Old Regime