Interaction as the Theme: Six Centuries of Exchange, 1400–2000

The idea

The exam's phrase for this unit is global themes and interactions, and the anchor's fourteen chapters can be read as one argument about how the world's regions came to act on one another. In fourteen hundred the interactions ran along old routes: Malacca's straits, the Saharan caravans, the Swahili monsoon trade, the Islamic world's markets under their inspectors, with firearms and maps moving among them. The turn to the sea, forced by fourteen fifty-three and made possible by borrowed navigation, added an ocean. What crossed it first was biological, the Columbian Exchange and the diseases that killed most of a hemisphere, and then economic: mercantilism's colonies, the sugar plantations, and the triangular trade that carried twelve million Africans and fed profits into Europe's first factories. The eighteenth century's interaction was intellectual and political: an Enlightenment indebted to Muslim and Indian science, argued in coffeehouses, and enacted in America, France, Haiti and Latin America in revolutions that differed in how much they broke. The nineteenth century's was industrial: the Second Industrial Revolution sorted the world into industrial nations and export economies, and imperialism, aided by medicine and weapons, took most of Africa and much of Asia while labor moved, free and coerced, across every continent. The twentieth century's interaction was catastrophic and then institutional: two total wars, a depression that proved the economies were one, a Cold War fought through containment, proxies and non-alignment, and, after nineteen ninety-one, the institutions the anchor lists as globalization's frame, from GATT and the WTO to the European Union and NAFTA. Each century's interaction rested on the last: the plantations on the crossing, the revolutions on the public sphere, the empires on the factories, the institutions on the wars. That dependence is what the exam means by interaction, and it is why a question about any one century may be answered from the one before.