World History and Global Interactions
This domain tests long-distance connection and exchange: trade networks, migration, conquest, disease, and the movement of ideas and crops across regions.
Networks before 1500
The Silk Roads linked Han China, Central Asia, Persia, and the Mediterranean, carrying silk, horses, Buddhism, and plague. Indian Ocean trade depended on monsoon winds and ports such as Malacca and Calicut. Trans-Saharan caravans moved gold and salt; the pilgrimage networks of Islam connected West Africa to Mecca. These were not single routes but overlapping circuits run by merchants, pastoralists, and states.
The Atlantic and globalization
After 1492 the Columbian exchange transferred maize, potatoes, and tomatoes eastward and wheat, horses, and cattle westward, alongside devastating pathogens. The Atlantic slave trade forcibly moved millions of Africans, shaping economies and cultures in the Americas. Later steamships, telegraphs, and canals intensified globalization; the twentieth century added air travel and digital networks.
Worked example
Compare the Columbian exchange's impact on the Americas and Eurasia. Reasoning: the Americas experienced catastrophic demographic collapse from smallpox and other diseases, plus forced labor and ecological change. Eurasia gained calorie-rich crops that supported population growth, but also new diseases and ecological disruption. Conclusion: exchange was asymmetric; disease and conquest gave Europeans disproportionate power.
Traps that cost marks
- Assuming globalization began only in the 1990s.
- Treating trade as only economic, ignoring religion and technology.
- Ignoring African and Asian agency in oceanic trade.
- Describing the Columbian exchange as mutually beneficial without noting disease and coercion.