Globalization Before Modernity: 1400-1800

Catalog description

How did the world first become "global"? Between 1400 and 1800, silver mined in the Andes financed silk bought in China, enslaved Africans built plantation empires across the Atlantic, and pilgrims, pirates, and merchants stitched together a world that had never before been so connected. This course follows the movements of money, people, goods, and belief across the great empires of the early modern world: the Ming and Qing, the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids, and the rising powers of Europe.Along the way we'll wrestle with some of history's biggest questions: In what sense can we speak of "globalization" before modernity? Where did the system we call "capitalism come from? And when - and why - did some economies begin to pull away from others? We'll move between the throne room and the marketplace, the plantation and the port, to see how rulers, merchants, agents, and ordinary people, free and enslaved, all shaped a connected world.