2. When Asia was the World Economy
This Asia-centered world economy had been
taking shape since the rise of Islam in the
seventh century.
Trade was done by Shipping mostly with Arabs.
Traders bought Chinese porcelain and silk in
Canton and Malaysia. Europeans shipped
Indonesian spices via the Red and
Mediterranean seas.
Piracy was common, but manageable.
Merchant groups, often organized on ethnic or
religious lines, maintained insurance funds to
ransom any members captured at sea.
Portuguese tried to take control of trading by
blockade.
Portuguese ships dealt harshly with those
whom they caught violating their monopoly--
sinking ships, bombarding ports, and burning
crops-they could not truly rule the ocean.
3. The Economic Cultures of Drugs
The fact is that historically, goods considered
drugs, that is, products ingested, smoked,
sniffed, or drunk to produce an altered state of
being, have been central to exchange and
consumption.
In the seventeenth century affluent people all
over the world began to drink, smoke, and eat
exotic plants that came from long distances.
Coffee, tea, cocoa, tobacco, and sugar all
became popular at roughly the same time. Both
European and Asian consumers became
addicted to these American, Asian, and African
products
4. Aztec Trades
Spanish and the Portuguese immediately
controlled their Trades.
The Europeans mind set was Indian were
Inferior Race, so Aztecs were
uninterested in European goods and the
broader world.
The Aztecs trades occurred in
Mesoamerica.
Bowls, knives, combs, blankets, and
featherwork were their primary goods
Chocolate, Cacao, Gold, jaguar pelts,
honey and rubber
5. Potatoes
The potato, "discovered" by Spanish soldiers
in the Peruvian Andes in the 1550s.
Considered a second-class food even in its
homeland, it had never made it north of
Colombia.
Spanish sailors carried potatoes to the
Philippines, In Asia, the same advantages that
made potatoes popular.
China feed the growing population on
potatoes.
Ireland and Russia were the first Europeans to
live on potatoes.
6. Sweet Revolutions
Sweetness was a taste little known to mankind
before the early modern period. Honey was the
only natural sweetener and it was not in great
or widespread supply. People had to rely on
bland diets of gruel, or rice, or tortillas. Only
seasonal fruits relieved the tedium.
Sugar began its march to global acceptance in
the Far East or perhaps the South Pacific. A tall
grass, it was first domesticated in India by 300
B.C., but spread slowly.
The Arabs were the first great sugar cultivators
A thousand years later it had reached China,
Japan, and the Middle East.
Egyptian sugar was regarded as the world's
finest.
7. Where There’s Smoke
Columbus had seen natives smoking the stuff
on his first trip to what he thought was the
easternmost extension of Asia's estate.
natives smoked, cooked, licked, ate, and
snorted tobacco.
They offered tobacco to their gods
In Brazil, Tupinamba Indians smoked and then went
"three or four days without eating anything anything,"
Tobacco plantations spread across the Virginia
countryside, eating forests in their paths
8. Mocca is not Chocolate
Coffee originally came from the Middle East.
Europeans were slow to adopt the coffee habit
for several reasons. ( Muslim drink, Turkish
fashion of a very thick, hot, black unsweetened
drink did not please European palates)
9. Chocolate
The cacao bean had been prized in
Mesoamerica since before the time of Christ.
The Americas' first civilization, used cacao and
in turn passed on the custom to the Maya.
Cacao was considered to be a stimulant,
intoxicant, hallucinogen, and aphrodisiac.
Chocolate today is a sweet treat, a small
indulgence.
