powerpoint

1. Spices and Other Things
When Asia was the World Economy
The Economic Culture of Drugs
Aztec Traders
Potatoes
Sweet Revolutions
Where There’s Smoke…
Mocca is not Chocolate
Chocolate
Alison Venegas

2. 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.

3. •
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.

4. •
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.

5. 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 .

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.