The document discusses the history and global spread of several important trade goods including spices, drugs, Aztec goods, potatoes, sugar, tobacco, coffee, and chocolate. It describes how Asia initially dominated the spice trade with India and established trade blockades. It also discusses how drugs like cacao, sugar, opium, tea, tobacco, and coffee came to define modern cultures and how the Aztecs traded goods like rubber, chocolate, and obsidian.

1. Spices and Other Things
By: Cory Schiefer

2. When Asia was the World
Economy
• Asia was first to sail to India giving them trade rights on their spices.
• Created blockades on trade routes so they could get all resources
and no one else could.
• Asia brought paper and rice to Europe which became popular.
• Asia claimed a monopoly in pepper trade.

3. The Economic Culture of Drugs
• Drugs were seen as both medicine and sacraments of religious rites.
• Some of the drugs traded were cacao, sugar, opium, tea, tobacco,
and coffee.
• These drugs define our cultures today because we cannot live
without them.

4. Aztec Traders
• Mesoamerican traders traded rubber, chocolate, jaguar pelts, honey,
gold, turquoise, silver, cacao, and obsidian.
• Aztecs had there own caste that specialized in commerce.
• Trade with Aztecs was different from what we are used too because
government officials were the traders and forced the commoners to
trade.
• Global trade ended the Aztecs.

5. Potatoes
• When potatoes were first found in the Andes they were not a huge
hit but because they were cheap a lot of people bought them.
• Potatoes were one of the easiest crops to grow and it didn’t require
animals to plough so the poor could grow them.
• Potatoes became the food that military ate on the go, delicacy to rich
and poor, and the one food source to rely on when times were
tough.

6. Sweet Revolutions
• With sugar first growing in India around 300 B.C. it became a very
popular spice because of its sweet flavor.
• Because Asia was the head of trade in the 1500’s the king of
Portugal gave the pope a effigy made of 200 sugar candles.
• Sugar was one of the main causes of slavery, especially in the US.

7. Where There’s Smoke . . .
• With tobacco beginning with Indians in the Americas, it became a
very popular trade tool. Even to this day its very popular.
• Even though smoking was seen as a religious way to be spiritual, it
was outlawed and people who smoked the “demonic vegetable” was
to be punished.
• With sailors picking up the smoking habit, it quickly traveled around
the world.

8. Mocca is not Chocolate
• Coffee did not become popular until two centuries ago when people
started putting honey and milk in the coffee to make it more sweet
and less bitter. Coffee was also fairly expensive.
• With coffee being a native plant to Mocca, it brought a lot of trade to
Africa.

9. Chocolate
• Chocolate was first found when Columbus found the Mayans and
Aztecs.
• The cacao bean was used for many things including a energy potion
before battle, a aphrodisiac, and also a medicine.
• With the plant only growing in the tropical lowlands, it was a very
rare plant and could be used as money.
• The chocolate drink was known as a luxury.