MIDTERMHeather Rocca

PEOPLES AND EMPIRES The word "Empire" has become

as much as a metaphor as the description of a particular kind of society; moreover it suggests the ruthless exploitation of largely defenseless, technology unsophisticated peoples by the forces of technologically sophisticated ones.

Ever since the time of the Roman Republic, "empires" has been a word used to describe government over vast territories. Empires can be good or bad, but they most likely cause damage to others.

Most European countries were obsessed with owning more land and having the biggest and best land.

Within less than a century, Europeans had taken possession of much of America and had established enduring footholds in Asia and Africa. This expansion made it possible by social and economic changes in the emerging European nations. When the first true modern treaty was signed, the treat of Westphalia, the map of Europe transformed. The old European visions of universal empires had also faded away.

JOURNEY OF MAN Our ancestors started in

Africa, but when the weather started to change drastically, they started to move to new places.

This is how & why we all look different today, because as our ancestors moved, weather kept them isolated in certain lands where they evolved , and skin and hair color changed.

SPICES AND OTHER THINGS In the seventeenth century people

began to drink, smoke, and eat exotic plants. Coffee, tea, cocoa, tobacco, and sugar all became popular too.

With European voyages people exchanged certain foods with one another and that’s how people got a taste of new exotic foods.

Drugs were seen as both medicines and sacraments of religious rites.

The potato entered the Atlantic economy at its two extremes: a luxury side dish and as a staple for the enslaved Indians working the mines for the Spanish in Peru.

The only natural sweetener was honey, and then sugar came along. Sugar began its march to global acceptance in the far east.

Tobacco plantations spread across the Virginia countryside, and the tobacco trade brought the holocaust of slavery, the social cataclysms of civil war, and environmental devastation.

Everything was booming with popularity, and the Europeans were the slowest to adapt the coffee habit. Coffee was expensive and one of the top trading goods, so it took awhile for Europeans to get their hands on it.

THE WORLD IN 1942 Europeans believed that the globe

was arranged in parallel belts of climate zones, from the frigid poles to the torrid equator in 1942. Columbus’s voyage and subsequent ventures showed that the globe was not just a single ecumene surrounded by sea. Europe back then was swarmed with small states, some of which were coalescing into larger units

In 1942 most of India was under Muslim domination, except for the Hindu Kingdom of Vijayanagar in the South.

15th century: China had the potential to expand greatly its geographical horizons.

The ancient Mayans civilization had no authority in 1942. The destruction of the Mayan culture prevents anyone from learning about their society’s intellectual accomplishments.

Expansion of populations and world trade, food resources were beginning to strain under the weight; moreover, 70 % of humanity depended upon merely 7% of land under cultivation.

THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE The Columbian exchange did not begin

until 1942. The exchange was a dramatically widespread exchange of animal, pants, culture (including slaves), communicable diseases and ideas between the Eastern and Western hemispheres.

Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas in 1492 launched the era of large-scale contact between the old and the new worlds that resulted in this ecological revolution; therefore, that’s how the name came to be: Columbus exchange.