The pre-modern world: silk routes and food travels

Detail

Globalisation is old, not new

• Globalisation is not only a post-1950s story. It is a long series of phases of trade, migration and movement of money.
• Who carried it: travellers, traders, priests and pilgrims.
• What they carried: goods, money, skills, ideas — and germs (disease).
• Exam point: the same route that moves silk also moves faith and infection. One network, many cargoes.

How far back do the links go?

• c. 3000 BCE — an active coastal trade joined the Indus valley civilisations with West Asia.
• Cowries (sea shells used as money) came from the Maldives. They reached China and East Africa. This lasted over a thousand years.
• Germs travelled too. Long-distance spread of disease can be traced from the 7th century. By the 13th century the link is "unmistakable".
• So: money (cowries), goods and disease were already moving across oceans thousands of years ago.

The silk routes

• Not one road — many. Some over land, some by sea.
• They tied Asia together, and joined Asia to Europe and northern Africa.
• Time span: they existed from before the Christian Era and thrived almost till the 15th century.
• The name comes from Chinese silk going west.
• The land track began at Chang'an (today Xi'an) in north-central China, ran west along the Great Wall, over the Pamirs, through Afghanistan, into the Levant and Anatolia — about 6,400 km in all. Goods then crossed the Mediterranean to Europe. [2]

• Traders began using it more than 2,000 years ago; the Mongols revived it in the 13th–14th centuries (Marco Polo of Venice travelled to China on it); it fell out of use in the 1400s. [2]

• What moved west: Chinese silk, Chinese pottery, textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia.

• What moved east: precious metals — gold and silver — from Europe to Asia. Money flowed one way, goods the other.
• Silk was only one item. Also moving: textiles, spices, grain, fruit and vegetables, animal skins, tools, wood and metal goods, religious objects, art and precious stones. [3]

Culture moved with the cargo

• Trade and culture always travelled together.
• Early Christian missionaries used these routes; Muslim preachers followed later.
• Buddhism left eastern India and spread outward through the points where the routes crossed.
• Assyrian Christians took their faith into Central Asia and China; merchants from the Indian subcontinent brought Buddhism to China. [2]

Food travels — noodles or spaghetti?

• Food is proof of old contact. A dish moving is a person moving.
• Noodles may have gone west from China and become spaghetti.
• Or: Arab traders may have carried pasta to Sicily in the 5th century.
• Similar foods already existed in India and Japan. So nobody can say for sure who invented what.
• NCERT's point is not to settle the argument. It is that the argument is even possible — which shows how much pre-modern contact there was.

Food travels — after Columbus

• Many common foods were unknown in Europe, Asia and Africa about five centuries ago.
• They came only after Columbus reached the Americas. They were foods of the original inhabitants of the Americas.
• The list to memorise: potato, soya, groundnut, maize, tomato, chilli, sweet potato.

The potato and the Irish famine

• The potato changed Europe's poor.
• They ate better.

• They lived longer.

• But Ireland became dependent on one crop. The poorest survived almost on potato alone.

• Disease destroyed the crop. The Great Irish Potato Famine, 1845–49. Hundreds of thousands starved.
• NCERT caption: about 1,000,000 died, and double that number emigrated.
• The disease was late blight, a water mould that arrived from North America in 1845 and thrived in that year's cool, damp weather. Irish farmers grew only one or two potato varieties, so there was almost no genetic variety to resist it. [4]
• Ireland's population fell from about 8.4 million in 1844 to 6.6 million by 1851. Most who left went to the United States, Canada, England or Australia. [4]
• Lesson for the exam: one crop + one variety + one disease = collapse. Globalisation gave Ireland the potato; it also gave Ireland the blight.

Prelims Hooks

• c. 3000 BCE — coastal trade linked the Indus valley civilisations with West Asia.
• Cowries came from the Maldives and reached China and East Africa.
• Germ spread traceable from the 7th century; "unmistakable link" by the 13th century.
• Silk routes existed before the Christian Era and thrived almost till the 15th century.
• Land silk route ran from Chang'an (Xi'an), about 6,400 km, over the Pamirs to the Levant. [2]
• Direction of flow: silk, pottery, textiles, spices west; gold and silver east.
• Buddhism spread out of eastern India through the silk routes' intersecting points.
• Arab traders may have taken pasta to Sicily in the 5th century.
• Post-Columbus American foods: potato, soya, groundnut, maize, tomato, chilli, sweet potato.
• Great Irish Potato Famine 1845–49: about 1,000,000 dead, about 2,000,000 emigrated; cause was late blight. [4]

Mains Points

• Globalisation has a long pre-industrial history. The Indus–West Asia coastal trade (c. 3000 BCE), Maldivian cowries reaching China and East Africa, and silk routes active from before the Christian Era to the 15th century show that world connections did not begin with modern capitalism. Use this to attack the idea that globalisation is a 20th-century invention.
• Trade routes are always cultural and biological routes. The same silk routes carried Chinese silk, Christian missionaries, Muslim preachers, Buddhism out of eastern India — and germs. A GS-I answer can link this to the later Columbian exchange and to the role of disease in the conquest of the Americas.
• Food is evidence. The noodle–spaghetti puzzle cannot be solved, and that is the point: shared foods across China, India, Japan and Sicily show contact we have no written record of. Post-Columbus, the potato, maize and chilli reshaped diets in Europe, Asia and India.
• Dependence is the dark side of exchange. The potato lengthened lives in Europe but made Ireland dependent on a single crop with almost no genetic variety [4]. When blight struck in 1845, a million died and two million left. Globalisation delivers gains and vulnerability in the same parcel — a useful line for any question on the costs of interdependence.