What’s the Significance?
Big Picture Questions
What motivated and sustained the long-distance commerce of the Silk Roads, Sea Roads, and Sand Roads?
Why did the peoples of the Eastern Hemisphere develop long-distance trade more extensively than did those of the Western Hemisphere?
“Cultural change derived often from commercial exchange in the third-wave era.” What evidence from this chapter supports this observation?
In what ways was Afro-Eurasia a single interacting zone, and in what respects was it a vast region of separate cultures and civilizations?
Looking Back: Compared to the cross-cultural interactions of earlier times, what was different about those of the third-wave era?
Next Steps: For Further Study
Jerry Bentley, Old World Encounters (1993). A wonderfully succinct and engaging history of cross-cultural interaction all across Afro-Eurasia before 1500.
William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange (2008). A global account of “how trade shaped the world.”
E. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (1970). A classic account of the trans-Saharan trade.
Nayan Chanda, Bound Together (2007). Places contemporary globalization in a rich world historical context.
K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean (1985). A well-regarded study that treats the Indian Ocean basin as a single region linked by both commerce and culture during the third-wave era.
Philip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (1984). Explores long-distance trade as a generator of social change on a global level.
Xinru Liu, The Silk Road in World History (2010). A brief, accessible, and up-to-date account by a leading scholar.
Silk Road Seattle, http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/. A wonderful Web site about the Silk Road with many artistic images and maps as well as extensive narrative description of vast network of exchange.