world and trade project #2

2. The Economic Culture of Drugs

3. Aztec Traders

4. Potatoes

5. Sweet Revolutions

6. Where There’s Smoke…

7. Mocca is not Chocolate

8. ChocolateAlison Venegas

9. When Asia was the World Economy Traders bought Chinese porcelain and silk in Canton and Malaysia. Europeans shipped Indonesian spices, and from Eastern Europe, Turkey, and Sub-Saharan Africa there was imports of Gold, iron, timber, and slaves both white and black. Luxury goods were exchanged, flour, firewood, rice growing, that spread from Asia to India. Islamic trade routes brought paper-making from China to Europe, and Greek medicine back into a Europe that had lost it. The arrival of Portuguese caused tension in Asia, peasants were revolting and by the 1500’s a war had started.

10. Aztec Traders The pre-Columbian Indians were good in trading with the Europeans. Turquoise and silver from New Mexico were traded down to Mexico City in exchange for knives, bowls, blankets, and feather work. Aztecs traded rubber from Veracruz, chocolate from Chiapas, jaguar pelts and honey from Yucatan, gold from Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and cacao from Honduras and El Salvador. The Pre-Americans didn’t have large animals or carriages, so thousands of people would have to carry the loads on their heads and backs crossing mountains just to trade with other people. Eventually, the Spanish took over their lands and used the Aztecs as slaves. Eventhough trading was great in the beginning, trading destroyed the Indian cilvilization.

11. Potatoes After the Spanish took all the gold and riches from the Indians. They soon started to take the foods, like corn and potatoes. The potatoes came from the Peruvian Andes, found by Spanish soldiers in the 1550’s. It had never made it to north of Columbia and was rarely planted. At first potatoes were considered poisonous, but crisis created needs of the potatoes. Today it’s the second larges food crop in the world. Potatoes were important in the Andes because they were able to resist cold weathers and many other plants couldn’t. The Spanish took the potatoes where they spread all over Europe and Asia. When there was food shortage people would count on the potatoes. In the seventeenth century, during the war in Ireland, they save a lot of people and by the end of the end of the century, potatoes were the dominant source for Irish food.

12. Sweet Revolutions Sugar wasn’t popular in the beginning. Around 300 B.C it was first domesticated in India and slowly spread. In one thousand years it reached China, Japan, and the Middle East. The Arabic’s were the first to cultivate sugar, and Egypt having the finest. The Portuguese discovered Atlantic islands with successful sugar production, but were horrified by the workers conditions. Africans were slaved and shipped to other countries in poor conditions. When slaves were freed after a long fight for their freedom, they started to create a new life without being sugar farmers .

13. Where There’s Smoke… The Native Americans were always looked as savages with weird traditions. One of them was spiting and smoking herbs. At the first the Spanish and natives had no interest in trading with each other, but once they tried it themselves, they couldn’t stop. Native Americans used tobacco to offer it to their gods, eat it, use it for medicine, and other purposes. Some soldiers noticed Indians could go without eating for days when they smoked. The smoking began when sailors couldn’t stop smoking and it reached all over Europe and Asia. Tobacco plantations spread across the Virginia countryside and as the production grew, slavery also rose. Then doctors started to warn people smoking caused cancer. People wander if Indians were smoking some other herb, and tobacco was a mistake Spanish assume was the herb Indians smoked.

14. Mocca is not Chocolate Coffee came from Yemen’s port of Mocca. At first coffee was mostly an Arabic, Egyptian, and Indian drink. Not only was the coffee expensive, but Europeans didn’t like the bitter flavor so much. For Muslims, they found it a heresy for drinking coffee. During a war, the Turks had left many coffee bags behind and the owner of the first Viennese coffee house, instead of throwing them away he added milk and honey, which the Europeans loved. The town of Betelfaguy, a two-day trip inland from Mocca, was one of the major markets. Farmers brought their beans down from their nearby plots throughout the year. Once people got tired of waiting for their coffee orders its when countries started to plant their own coffee plants. Soon everyone had coffee and Mocca was just remembered as the ones creating a delicious drink.

15. Chocolate The Olmecs, the Americas' first civilization, used cacao and in turn passed on the custom to the Maya. Grown only in the tropical lowlands, cacao was traded to the highland civilizations of Teotihuacan and later the Aztecs. It was as much coveted for its pharmacological effects and rarity as for its taste. Chocolate used to be drunk with Chili peppers, some flower, corn, and lime water. Cacao beans were so precious and rare that they were used as money and Spanish continued this tradition in central Mexico for decades and in parts of Central America for centuries. Chocolate was considered a catholic drink. In early sixteenth-century Spain, chocolate was mixed with water, sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla. Two centuries later, hot chocolate was then made with milk. The first stimulant to gain favor in Europe, cacao became Spanish America's primary export agricultural good. Cacao trees were cultivated in Venezuela and Central America and then transplanted to the Philippines and Indonesia, Brazil, and finally Africa. Then the cacao bean became a commodity rather than a money.