THE SILK ROADS + Cultural Transfers (U2)

Vast network of roads and trails hat facilitated trade and spread of culture and ideas in and after 1200-1450

Trade and goods, as cultural ideas and traits → cultural diffusion

• Luxury items that were exchanged

• Chinese silk

  • Earn an amount of profits

Networks of exchange (cause and effect)

• Grew because of innovations and commercial practices

1) Development of money economies

• Using paper money to facilitate trade

• Merchant could deposit bills and then withdraw in another location, increase ease of security and travel with transactions

• Incrasing use of credit

  • Secure piees of paper, go to another region and exchange paper for coins

  • “Flying money”

• Rise of Banks

  • In Europe, they introduced banking houses based on China

Transportation

• Rise of caravan sarai

  • Traveling merchants and their animals could rest for the night

  • Provided safety from plunderes

  • Became centers of cultural exchange and diffusion

    • Various diff cultural backgrounds, mingle with each other

• Saddles

  • Make riding easier over long distances

  • Sling frame and mattress

  • Easier to pay and get paid for goods, safer to travel

EFFECT #1: Powerful trading cities

• Strategically located along routes, grew in wealth

• Cities along the way provided rest

• Kashgar (east of China) convergent of two silk roads, very hot and dry

  • Built around a river, lush valley suitable for agriculture

  • Traveling merchants could stop there

  • Destination hosting highly profitable markets and thriving center of Islamic scholarship

• Samarkand

  • Samarkand and Kashgar strategically located on Silk Road

  • Cultural exchange

EFFECT #2: Increased demand for luxury goods

• Chinese silk and porcelain

• Buyers demand more, sellers prepare more goods

• Chinese, Indian, Persian artisans increased thier production goods

• Yangtze river valley spent more time producing silk, significantly going back on food production

Proto-industrialization

• Produce more goods than their population could consume, sell to distant lands

• Reinvest in iron and steel industries

EFFECT #3: Cultural diffusion

• Islam merchants spread Islam, Buddhist merchants spread Buddhism

• Exposed to different innovations

• Spread of people’s germs → Bubonic plague

CULTURAL TRANSFERS:

• merchants spread across the world, brought their technology and ideas

1) Cultural transfers

• Spread of belief system

  • Buddhism spread from India to East Asia around 2 century CE

  • Root among the Chinese, Buddhism changed again

  • Explained in chinese Daoism → Syncretism

    • Created Chan Buddhism (popular among lower classes)

    • In Japan, created Zen Buddhism

  • Islam: supportive of merchant activity

  • Muslim merchants had plenty of places to go, possibility of inclusion

  • Encouraged leaders across Africa and SE Asia to convert

  • Swahili civilization grew powerful through trade, connected to IOT

2) Artistic and literary transfers

• Commented on works of Greek and Roman philisophy in Baghdad House of Wisdom

3) Scientific and technoligical innovations

• Chinese paper making to Europe

• Moveable type - Europeans → Literacy

• Gunpowder by Mongols, US perfected weapons and power

Consequences of connecivity on rise and fall of cities

• Rise: Power in trading cities

• Hangzhou in China (Southern end of Grand Canal)

  • More trade, further urbanization and more population

• Samarkand and Kashgar

  • Grew in power and influence, expansion of trading networks increased thier influence and productivity

• Decline: Baghdad

  • center of islamic art and achievement

  • Mongols sacked baghdad and brought abbasid empire to an end

• Constantinople

  • Rise of islamic ottoman empire, sacked constantinople and renamed it istanbul

Facilitated interregional travel

• Increased safety

• Ibn Battuta (muslim scholar from Morocco)

• Traveled all over Dar-al Islam

  • Took notes

• Possible because of trade routes

• Rode on camels and merchant caravans

• Wrote about them, readers develp understand far-flung cultures from the world

Marco Polo

• Traveled from Italy to China

• IOT

• Court of Kublai Khan, and China’s grandeur and wealth later travelers confirmed Polo’s oversavtions

Margery Kemp

• Christian mystic

• Pilgrimmages to Christianitys (Jerusalem, Spain, etc.) holy sites