Welcome back.

At the end of the last lecture, I left you with the sound of hoofbeats of Mongol Empire and chariots and cavalries sweeping across Eurasia from Baghdad to Beijing, adding a layer of political interconnectedness to what was already a process of increasing religious, economic and social interconnectedness across the Eurasian world. And we can ask ourselves, was that the story of the beginnings of globalization? And one of themes I want to explore with you, we are going to do this today and we are going to do this over and over again, are the ways in which the roads to the present are many. There isn't a single story of globalization. But many historians have tried to put some emphasis on the shakeups that occurred in the fourteenth century with the combination of commercial and political interconnections. Let's just revisit some of the aspects of the story that we explored last time. We saw in the expansion of both the overland trade routes and the sea lanes of the Afro-Eurasian system, a whole set of causeways connective systems that brought the parts of the world together. These were conveyors, these were conveyors for, for priests for merchants. And, of course, as we talked about in the last lecture for conquering armies and cavalries. These were also the causeways, however, for a more invisible force. One of the themes I want to bring forth not just is the, the multiple ways in which globalization unfolds, but some of the more surprising invisible forces in shaping the making of our modern world. So, we could tell the story about the sounds of hooves ushering in the epic of globalization. We could also tell the story about the role that pathogens and invisible forces, the micro, micro fauna of the world, play in the history of globalization. So, we could instead of ending the last lecture with hoofbeats, I could have ended it with the sound of whimpers. The sound of millions upon millions of people dying from an invisible enemy that they never knew was there. The fourteenth century was also the century of the Great Plague. We're going to talk over and over again about the role the diseases played in

shaping world history. We know it now as the era of the Black Death. Black, in part, because it was a black hole. We literally didn't know, people did not know how to explain the horrible tragedy that was surrounding them to their children, to their parents, to the priests and to the rulers. In fact, the Black Death was a series of plagues that swept across Eurasia. Let me show you a map here and before I switch over to it take one more glance at this system of causeways, the commercial networks that connected Afro-Eurasia. Now, have a look at this one. One thing that should be apparent to you are the ways in which the spread of the pathogens across Afro-Eurasia followed the commercial trails of the Silk Road which had themselves been the causeways for the Mongol conquistadors. The devastation that swept across Afro-Eurasia was especially intense in the most highly populated areas across the southern belt of Afro-Eurasia. Those were the hubs of the political and economic trading systems that we described in the last lecture. So, the migratory paths of the pathogens were exactly the migratory paths of the camels, the people, the troops that moved across Afro-Eurasia. And we should not be surprised, why? Because the pathogens were carried aboard, the ships and on the caravans that moved across Afro-Eurasia. They literally infected the hubs. The Black Death swept across the region, carried by rats. Aboard fleas that carried the bacilli from rat to rat, and then transmitted from rats to humans. This is an image common of the period to describe the ways in which villagers, and I might ask you to compare this image of village life to that bucolic image of Brueghel that we talked about the last lecture. Death. A gruesome spectacle. From rats to humans the bacilli spread, yielding to awful, truly awful death rates, in part because the population levels of the world had been rising so much, due to the increase in wealth, expansion of agrarian frontiers, and with high population densities the bacilli could spread that much more easily.

So, China, to give you a sense of the, scale of the mortality rates, China's population which had reached a peak of about a 120 million people by the 1320s saw its population decline to 80 million within a generation. Europe lost 60%of its population. Now, as I mentioned the most affected regions were those connective, those places where the connective system was the most intense. The trading ports the posts, the caravan cities that we talked about earlier. Black, the Black Death, those multiple waves of disease that spread across Eurasia was a sign that while societies were not yet interdependent in the same way that we think about globalization nowadays, they were certainly interconnected. The viruses and plagues could spread as the microfauna did. And in some respects, we can draw from this image of the spreading disease one in a microscopic display of, the ways in which globalization operates, create, in fact, metaphors that we use more and more, the role that viruses play. Nowadays, we think of it much more that viruses are financial or, or, or political viruses. But I like to think that the Black Death offers us, in a sense, a metaphor for ways of thinking about the interconnections between the world. The Black Death though, because of its sheer devastation, invisible forces ravaging societies that people could not explain to themselves. In a sense was a terrible blow to that emerging system that we described in the last lecture of commercial interconnection and increasing a political connections across the Mongol Empire. The Black Death wiped out entire markets. This, of course, coincided with the fragmentation of the Mongol empire that in a sense really did not outlive the work of Genghis Khan and increasingly, the kingdoms that were left in the hands of his sons drifted apart from each other and in fact, drifted not so not just a, apart from each other but collapsed into increasing fratricidal conflict in many cases. But what this meant was that from the thirteenth century of growing interconnection, the fourteenth century was a period of turmoil, of death, of quarreling and feuding across

Afro-Eurasia. This round of chaos and conflict cleaned the slate for the emergence of whole new political systems across Afro-Eurasia and usher, usher in a new phase in world history. Now, it is very important for you to realize that not all parts of the world were as equally affected by what I've described as these Afro-Eurasian processes. Not all regions were as affected by the visible and invisible forces of what we might now call globalization. These are worlds apart. One place that was completely unaffected by these Afro-Eurasian interconnected processes was, of course, the Americas. And I'm going to come back to the Americas in more detail in a subsequent lecture, but you need to know that once the Americas, the New World, was cut off from its connection to Afro-Eurasia with rising sea waters, that plunged the land bridge that once connected North America to Siberia. Once it was plunged underwater, there was for all intents and purposes no sustained contact between the new world and the old world. That meant that with the emergence of complex major civilizations in the Americas, were not part of the same pool of technologies, commodities, and pathogens that circulated around Afro-Eurasia. The Americans, Native American peoples, created their own and inhabited their own pools and did not share in the same pools as Afro-Eurasia. Now, having no contact meant, meant therefore, no borrowing. And I'm going to go into the consequences of the Americas being a world apart in a future lecture. That's very important for you to bear that in mind. Another area of the world that was less touched by these processes that swept across Afro-Eurasia were parts of Africa. And I've referred to Afro-Eurasia for reasons you're going to see momentarily Because parts of Africa were touched. But as you move further into the inland of the continent, Africa was, to a very large extent we can consider it a region apart. So, Africa was only partly connected to the systems that connected Baghdad, Beijing and, and Paris. Particularly, the western and southern

parts of Africa and the interior were relatively untouched. These were areas of wealthy kingdoms in as sense living apart and they would remain apart until Europeans would devise a way to circumnavigate Africa. And I'm going to come back to that process in a later lecture. But North Africa and East Africa were affected by the Afro-Eurasian processes. They were integrated within the Silk Road and the Sea Lane systems. Mogadishu, for instance, was a very important port in the Sea Lane trading systems. Indeed, all of the East African coast from Mogadishu downwards, was called the Swahili coast which is from the Arabic root of the word, sahel, which means the southern coast of the Sahara. There, Persians, Arabs, Jews, South Asian Buddhists and eventually, Chinese would populate towns and eventually cities all up and down the East African coast, producing and exporting ivory foodstuffs. But most importantly, we're going to see this as the recurring phenomenon, gold. Injecting liquidity into the system that would fuel that network of Arab trading systems that we talked about in the last lecture. So, the centerpiece of these trading hubs up and down the coast was in fact, the mosque. In Kilwa, which is an important center, an island off of the east coast of Africa founded by Muslims from Persia, they were not in fact Arabs. The largest created the largest mosque in sub-Saharan Africa. These communities were mixed communities, all along the Swahili coast. Africans and immigrants from all over that can converge on to these hubs. Creating often a, a hybrid religious system of Islam with local police systems. For instance, in the practice of witchcraft and rain making practices. Indeed, one Chinese chronicler, a man called Zhao Rugua, once noted that many people, and this is, he's a reporter, back to, to the back to the government in Beijing, a chronicle that many people practice magical arts and can change themselves into birds and beasts, or sea creatures, to frighten and delude the foolish commoners. If their business dealings with a foreign ship arises, they can cast a spell to bring the ship to a standstill so that it

cannot move forwards or backwards. And only when the crew have consented to make peace will they let them go. The point here being that as reporters noted that along the Swahili Coast, you have the development of increasingly mixed communities. This is another theme we're going to explore a lot in this course. So, the ways in which people from different parts of the world, of different faiths, languages come together and create cosmopolitan communities. From the point of view of the relationship between Africa and the Afro-Eurasian system, what we see is the integration of the coastal regions into the broader trading network including the beginnings of the shipment of slaves out of Africa for sale and the rest of the trading systems. Indeed, by the year 1150, we have evidence that African slaves are working as far away as the port of Canton, not for Chinese employers, but actually rather for Arab merchant households. So here, we see on the fringes of Africa, the beginnings of contact with the rest of the world. And we can begin to see evidence of the kinds of phenomena we will see unfolding elsewhere. The creation of new belief systems, new communities new ways or, or, or efforts on the part of people to amalgamate inherited traditions with new practices that they encounter by sharing communities with other peoples. So, it's not just commodities that are on the move when we talk about globalization. Let me pause here, and I want you to collect your thoughts and consider how then unevenly the spread of the process of global connections was and what some of the unintended surprising consequences were.