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Course: World History Project AP® > Unit 1
Lesson 2: 1.2—Developments in Asia- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Unit 1 Overview - The Global Tapestry
- WATCH: Unit 1 Overview
- READ: Unit 1 Introduction - The Global Tapestry, 1200 to 1450
- READ: East Asia 1200-1450
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Silk and the State in Song Dynasty China
- WATCH: Silk and the Song Dynasty
- READ: Dar-al-Islam 1200–1450
- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Emergence of Islam
- WATCH: The Emergence of Islam
- READ: South and Southeast Asia 1200–1450
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READ: Unit 1 Introduction - The Global Tapestry, 1200 to 1450
Societies around the world from 1200 to 1450 were both together and apart. From one region to the next, and even within regions, people formed their communities in unique ways. But they were often also connected to each other in systems.
The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.
First read: preview and skimming for gist
Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.
Second read: key ideas and understanding content
Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.
By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:
- What is the difference between “world-systems” with a hyphen and “world system” without a hyphen?
- Why does the author say that the world in 1200-1450 seemed like “worlds apart”?
- How does the author characterize different regions of Afro-Eurasia? What were some characteristics of each region?
- Why did distant, seemingly separate parts of the world nevertheless share many similarities? What are the two possibilities the author provides?
Third read: evaluating and corroborating
Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.
At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:
- What were the similarities and differences in the ways communities were organized in different parts of the world from c. 1200 to c. 1450?
- The author explains a seemingly silly debate about the use of a hyphen in world-systems. But he also mentions that this is also a meaningful debate. Do you agree that it’s meaningful? Why or why not?
- The author outlines two different lenses for examining the world from 1200 to 1450, as a world of similarities and connections, or as a world of differences and separations. How do you think our understanding of the world changes depending on which of these lenses you use?
Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to these questions once you’ve finished reading.
Unit 1 Introduction: The global tapestry, c. 1200 to 1450
By Trevor Getz
Societies around the world from 1200 to 1450 were both together and apart. From one region to the next, and even within regions, people formed their communities in unique ways. But they were often also connected to each other in systems.
World-systems or a world system?
Believe it or not, we are going to begin this history of the world with an argument about a hyphen. This complex debate is the sort that gets people with PhDs rather fired up, because it’s silly and meaningful at the same time. Some background first:
We live, today, in something called a world-system. (Notice the hyphen, making it one big noun). Our world-system is a group of states, institutions, and networks that are connected to each other by ties of commercial trade, migration, the exchange of ideas, and a shared natural environment. We know a couple of things about this world-system. We know that changes in one area affect the others, often quite dramatically. Also, not every person or region is in a position to shape the world-system or be affected by it in the same way. Another important feature of our world-system is that it does, indeed, cover the whole world. This characteristic is said to date back to about 1500 CE, when the two hemispheres—one containing Afro-Eurasia (Europe, Africa, and Asia) and the other the Americas—were definitively connected. So now, back to that hyphen argument.
The argument over the hyphen goes like this:
Person with PhD #1: “There were historical systems before 1500 that were big and complex, and were a world unto themselves. So, even though they didn’t cover the whole of the planet, let’s still call them “world-systems” with a hyphen, and with a plural ‘s’”
Person with PhD #2: “There’s only one world, my friend. So there has only ever been a single world system. Lose the ‘s’ and the hyphen. Or I swear I will smash this globe.”
So can you see why this argument is silly, but also meaningful?
Worlds apart
It was once common to study the world around 1200 CE as a bunch of different regions. This was three centuries before the hemispheres got to know each other, after all. Moreover, travel and communications in this period were difficult. There were no jet airliners and no gigantic cargo ships. Radio, TV, internet, even regular mail service were centuries away from being invented. As a result, it seemed like different regions were “worlds apart”. In many cases, culture, politics, and economics were unique from region to region, and even within regions.
In this unit, and in the AP course as it is designed, we start our study of the past by looking at the systems of organization, systems of governance, and systems of belief in different parts of the world. We begin with the more populous hemisphere, Afro-Eurasia, and then move on to the Americas.
In each case, we are looking at continuities and changes that manifest in each region. At the center of Afro-Eurasia, a series of Islamic political entities connected the regions of this landmass with each other. Although ruled by Muslims, these societies often had populations that followed a wide array of faiths, including Judaism and Christianity. In the relatively nearby regions of South and Southeast Asia, Islamic faiths mingled with Hinduism and Buddhism. Here, many new states, most quite small, rose across the thirteenth century. Some fell, some grew larger, and some were transformed by the states that succeeded them. Europe, in the west, was similarly fragmented and decentralized, although its societies were often connected by ties of the Christian faith and by some shared cultural elements left over from Roman rule. In East Asia, meanwhile, the ancient ethical system of Confucianism and a long history of imperial bureaucracy sustained a unified government across the vastness of China. This government, the Song Dynasty, relied on peasant labor to feed a large population, but long-distance commerce also played a large role in society.
Sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas are two other regions that you will encounter at length in this unit. These larger regions are often depicted as more “separate”, more “different”, than the many parts of Eurasia. You will use evidence to judge for yourself whether this depiction is accurate. Certainly, both were physically somewhat separate from the big Eurasian landmass. While North Africa had close connections to both Europe and the Islamic world, areas to the south were somewhat blocked by the Sahara Desert, a vast sea of sand. The Americas, meanwhile, were separated from both Africa and Eurasia by seas of water—the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Nevertheless, these were both regions with long histories of religious innovation and state-building, and in the thirteenth century they had their own flavors of community-building both in the form of large states and in alternate kinds of societies.
Worlds together
The regions of the world were in many ways pretty different, but historians have found that they also shared a lot of characteristics. Some of that was a result of humans in different places reaching similar solutions or ideas separately. But some of it was a result of connections, both within and between these massive regions of the world.
Stories of connectivity can help us understand how and why different regions formed their communities. For example, we will see how Islamic societies acted both to preserve older knowledge, like that of the Roman Empire, and to encourage and spread innovations from one region to another. We will see how these connections allowed ideas and technologies from South Asia and China to impact European societies, often dramatically. We will explore the interactions that created cultural continuities like the Bantu and Sudanic forms of states in Central and West Africa, and a widespread cultural system across Mesoamerica.
Throughout this course, we explore systems like this through a number of themes such as cultural developments and interactions, governance, and technology and innovation, among others. In this unit, we will see how many societies in this era were learning from and interacting with their neighbors, even though they were not yet all connected. We will see that in many ways, these different regions were worlds together, and worlds apart.
Questions of time and space
These cultural networks raise the question of whether or not there were several geographically separate world-systems in the thirteenth century, when this unit opens. Certainly, there was not yet a single world system. But as well as raising questions of geography (space), it raises questions of chronology (time). Because there was, of course, great change over this period. For example, just looking at Afro-Eurasia, we find a mind-boggling set of connections between these regions in the thirteenth and early fourteenth century. One anthropologist who was also a historian, Janet Abu-Lughod, wrote extensively about this era as a period in which ideas spread rapidly from one place to another. Abu-Lughod believed that there were a number of linked world-systems (with the hyphen) in Eurasia in this period, as the map below shows.
Yet in the 1340s, a plague spread along these same trade routes, in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and brought down much of this network, killing tens of millions or possibly hundreds of millions of people. In the decades that followed, that system no longer operated, and it only really recovered in the fifteenth century, when this unit ends.
But we need to consider time and space together, because things that happen in one region in a particular era don’t always impact other regions in the same way. The Black Death didn’t hit sub-Saharan Africa the way it hit other places, and it didn’t touch the Americas at all. Even Poland, surrounded by Europe’s plague-affected areas, seems to have been spared.
That’s why this unit emphasizes two of the most important lessons of history. The first is addressed in Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s eye-opening video The Danger of a Single Story. The fact is, humans have had many different, even unique experiences in history. Ironically, when we try to flatten them into one global history, we lose those experiences even as we try to understand our connections to each other. The other lesson, presented by Bob Bain, asks us to test the narratives we are given by using evidence. Only by combining these two lessons can we come close to reaching histories that are both accurate and meaningful to us today.
Whether it’s world system or world-systems, or whether we tell one story or many, may seem obscure and silly. But this is where historical thinking starts. In this course, you are going to explore how these debates matter by putting them into practice yourself. Good luck!
Author bio
Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.