The document discusses the globalization of trade through valuable crops and commodities. It describes how Aztec traders acquired goods like turquoise, silver, rubber, and chocolate to trade throughout Mesoamerica. Potatoes became an important crop that could yield many calories with little labor. Sugar and coffee cultivation led to the rise of brutal slave labor and the growth of secular coffeehouse culture. Cacao beans evolved from being used as currency to an internationally traded commodity.
2. When Asia was the World economy
Strait of Malacca Strait of Hormuz
•Two of three
places where
west bound
trade routes
could be
blocked.
•Asia waters;
essential for
world trade.
3. The Economic Culture of Drugs
Since the dawn of time, the people wanted commodities such as sugar, coffee, tea,
tobacco and alcohol. These items alter the state of mind then in turn have been
stereotyped as “DRUGS”. Taxes on these so called drugs, still fund civilizations today.
Coffee Tobacco
4. Aztec Traders
Aztec traders acquired turquoise and silver from new Mexico was traded down to
Tenochtitlan in exchange for either bowles,knives,combs, blankets, and feather work.
They also accumulated rubber from Veracruz,chocalate from Chiapas, jaguar pelts
and honey from the Yucatan, gold from Nicaragua, cacao and obsidian from
Honduras or El Salvador, and gold from Costa Rica.
5. One Potato, Two Potato
Potato crops Potatoes
•New World Crop
•Yield a lot of calories
per acre
•Wide variety of
vitamins
•Require little labor
•Easy to store
6. Sweet revolutions
•Monopolize from sugar
•Brutallness of sugar; harsh labor slavery
•Sugar plantation workers said, if you don’t free us then we will free ourselves.
7. Where There’s Smoke…
•Money = power and economical growth
•Where one person smoked, soon would be another to follow.
8. Mocca is Not Chocolate
•The coffee beverage was probably developed around 1400 in the city of Mocco
•Coffee also became intimately related to the growth of secular society; hence,
coffeehouses became one of the few secular public places in Muslim lands short of
public space.
9. Chocolate: From coin to Commodity
•These curious beans were known in Mayan as ka-ka-wa, which the Aztecs changed to
cacao and the Spanish eventually corrupted into chocolate.
•In early times the cacao bean used to be used as payment.
•Cacao trees began being cultivated in Venezuela and Central America and then
transplanted to the Philippines and Indonesia, Brazil, and finally Arica. The cacao bean
became a commodity rather than a coin.
