1) The document discusses the global trade networks that existed centuries ago, including family firms that spanned India, Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt. 2) It then covers the economic role of commodities like drugs, tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar, which were traded over long distances and gained popularity in places like China, the Middle East, and Europe. 3) Finally, it discusses how commodities like chocolate and cocoa beans were valued in pre-Colombian Mesoamerica and later incorporated into European trade.

1. Michael Warnick- History 140 The World and Trade part 2

2. When Asia Was the World Economy The Portuguese actually reached India by sea in the 1490s. They helped the new societies in India to undermine a vast commercial system centered on the Indian Ocean. As the first Arab converts conquered much of the Byzantine world to their West and the Sassanid lands to their East, they laid down few economic rules; both the converted and unconverted traders of Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Tashkent continued business as usual. The limited unity that the caliphate created–particularly in currency–was essential to this burgeoning trade. Within this cosmopolitan world, businesses spanned vast areas. The letters of one group of Jewish merchants, found centuries later in a Cairo synagogue, reveal a The Portuguese government was the first to attack the principle–common throughout the region–that the sea belonged to no one, and the first to use force to redirect trade. Family firm with branches in India, Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt.

3. The Economic Culture of Drugs Drugs refer to outlaw commodities, socially harmful and criminal goods that dwell in the underworld of the black market. Drugs are viewed as an embarrassment to capitalism, a throwback to primitive times before bourgeois ethics and consumption patterns took hold. They are 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. Of these coffee, cocoa, tobacco, and sugar also became popular. For example, Tea and coffee gained initial favor in China and the Middle East because their caffeine contributed to the wakefulness necessary for religious rites.

4. Aztec Traders The Europeans discovered thriving Arab, Indian, and Chinese trade networks when they finally arrived in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. To the Europeans the Indians were considered racially inferior, lazy. They were also uninterested in profit and European goods and the broader world. Pre-Colombian Indians traded extensively. Caribbean islanders had frequent commercial intercourse. Turquoise and silver from New Mexico was traded down to Tenochtitlan, what we call Mexico City today, in exchange for pottery, weapons, combs, blankets…etc.

6. Spanish sailors carried potatoes to the Philippines, warding off scurvy in the process. In Asia, the same advantages that made potatoes popular in the Andes helped them find a niche wherever growing populations were pushing further up the mountainsides.

7. At the high end potatoes benefited from the belief that they were a potent aphrodisiac; and like most other vegetables and herbs in early modem Europe, they were grown in small quantities in the gardens of the rich.

8. As Europe's population boomed after 1600, an unprecedented food crisis developed, and a slowly growing chorus of botanists, reformers, and royal commissions became interested in the potato as a solution.

10. Where There’s Smoke… At the end of the sixteenth century, the Virginia colony was not looking so well. They were going threw tough winters and in some cases resulted in eating their dead loved ones for survival. In 1617 English slavers first brought slaves to America’s shore. This helped the rich very much. Those would could afford to buy slaves to help them farm were now able to have their children enter school and become educated. Most of these farmers grew tobacco. Tobacco was first seen by Columbus’s on his first voyage to the New World being smoked by the Natives. All along the eastern lip of the Americas, and scattered across the islands in their maw, natives smoked, cooked, licked, ate, and snorted tobacco. They offered tobacco to their gods, plied their women with it, and pulverized it into enema formulas. Throughout Europe, folks took up smoking with the fervor of the religious. And the religious in particular reacted with horror. Around the world, in fact, stories of tobacco-inspired native rituals were the manure from which sprang a crop of laws restricting the increasingly popular tobacco use.

11. Mocca Is Not Chocolate Being the first Frenchmen to ever round and sail into the Red Sea, Jean de la Roque and three French East Indian Company ships arrived in Yemen’s port of Mocca in 1708. Although coffee has long been associated with Latin America, for some three hundred years–half of coffee's lifetime as a commodity–coffea arabica was an Arabian monopoly. Coffea arabica appeared as a native plant in Ethiopia, the coffee beverage was probably developed around 1400 in the Yemeni city of Mocca. Europeans were slow to adopt the coffee habit because as a Muslim drink it was viewed as heretical and the Turkish fashion of a very thick, hot, black unsweetened drink did not please European palates. Coffee's role in sociability and prestige in Europe was enhanced by the arrival of emissaries of the Ottoman Sultan in France and Austria in 1665-1666 who poured the exotic liquor for their aristocratic European guests during extravagant soirees. The price of Coffee was very expensive. Not only did assembling the cargo require a lengthy stay, the sudden burst of demand that the Frenchmen represented caused prices to escalate.

13. Cacao was considered to be a stimulant, intoxicant, hallucinogen, and aphrodisiac. Warriors would count on cacao's caffeine to steel them in battle.

14. Taste was also important. They added many spices, some of which we today might not appreciate. Usually made into a beverage by adding water, chocolate was commonly drunk with chile peppers, flowers that resembled black pepper, the seeds of the pizle–which gave a bitter almond taste–or lime water.

15. Chocolate occupied a unique position in the Aztec marketplace. It was greatly desired, but rare. Natural stands of cacao trees grew in the tropical lowlands but the Maya peoples who lived in these areas were largely self-sufficient peasants. These beans were considered to be money to the Aztecs.

16. Although introduced into Spain as a spiritual drink of abstinence, it soon became, as in Mexico, the aristocracy's drink of leisure, luxury, and distinction.