Environmental Impact of Trade: Agriculture, Disease, and Population Shifts

hi and welcome back to handler sister in the last video we talked about the cultural consequences of the

interconnectedness that trade provided to the world from 1200 to 1450 this video is going to explore the

environmental consequences of that connectivity that sounds boring to you don't worry by the end of this video

we'll have talked about rice and bananas still sounds boring that's what I'm talking about

alright let's get to it alright we need to talk about two major categories of things that spread throughout networks

of exchange agriculture and disease so let's start with Agricole you see as merchants traveled from place to place

they sometimes introduced crops that those lands had never seen before when that happens there can be major

consequences one of the most significant of these crops I've mentioned in several other videos namely Champa rice Champa

rice was introduced to China by merchants who traveled from the Champa Kingdom in Vietnam and this strain of

rice was drought resistant and could be harvested several times a year this of course led to massive population growth

in China but the environmental impact of Champa rice was significant to the introduction of this crop led to the

transformation of the land namely in the form of Terrace farming this was a method of farming that made previously

unform opal land farmable by cutting steps into hillsides so that you could plant rice and again the more food that

was introduced into China the more the population grew another significant crop introduced by merchants was bananas and

this time it was Indonesian merchants bringing those crops into sub-saharan Africa and this has huge consequences

because when the Bantu speaking people of Africa learned how to plant this crop it changed their entire life you see for

these people their food staple was yams and so that means they lived exactly where yams could be produced so with the

introduction of the banana these people could move into regions where yams couldn't grow and spoiler alert they did

and so because this Indonesian fruit was introduced into Africa whole populations began to migrate the same kind of thing

happened all throughout the world and in general when new crops were introduced to a place populations increased but

when populations increase as you can imagine that puts more pressure on the land and that means there are more

consequences for example over grazing and Great Zimbabwe led to such severe environmental degradation that the whole

city was abandoned in the late 1400s in Europe the land was changed through deforestation which eventually led to

profound erosion of the soil combine that with the Little Ice Age that started in the 1300s and there was a

severely contracted agricultural production during that time okay those are some of the environmental effects as

a result of trade now let's look at the spread of disease lots of diseases spread through merchants arriving on new

shores but surely the most significant of these diseases was the Black Death or the bubonic plague

now today we understand how this disease was spread namely through fleas the way it worked was this fleas would bite a

carrier that was infected with the bubonic plague then the bacteria would multiply in the fleas guts until I got

so abundant that it would clog up the fleas gut so then they would bite anything that was near sometimes a human

and regurgitate that bacteria into the bite to me that's just insulting because not only are you getting the black death

into your bloodstream which is gonna kill you in a few days but you're also simultaneously getting honked on by a

fleet now thanks to our friends the Mongols and their unrelenting lust for more land as they pushed further and

further into new territories they unknowingly brought these fleas with them but the Mongols can't bear all the

weight of responsibility here the spread of this disease also came along trade routes especially ships that provided

homes to infected rats but not only that as merchants traveled over land they stopped to rest in what were called

caravanserai these were little places that dotted the length of the Silk Roads where merchants could rest and sleep

however they did so in close proximity to animals and animals have fleas so all that to say the black death was a major

consequence of connectivity during this time and whenever it showed up in a town the results were devastating probably

the most famous account of the effects of the black death came to us from the pen of Giovanni Boccaccio in his book

that de Cameron and there's a little taste the symptoms were not the same as in the east where a gush of blood from

the nose was the plain sign of inevitable death but it began both in men and women with certain swellings in

the groin er under the armpits they grew to the size of a small apple or an egg more or less and were vulgar Lee called

tumors in a short space of time these tumors spread from the two parts named all over the body soon after this the

symptoms changed in black and purple spots appeared on the arms or thighs or any other part of the body sometimes a

few large ones sometimes many little ones these spots were a certain sign of death just as the original tumor had

been and still remained and maybe Boccaccio's best summary of the effects of this disease we're as follows he said

the Adams's ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors anyway this

dreadful disease found its way into many societies throughout afro-eurasia and largely as the result of trade after all

was said and done it eviscerated huge portions of the world's population in fact in Europe for example most

estimates are somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% now as you can imagine this situation had significant

consequences and maybe one of the biggest consequences was economic the Black Death changed the relationship

between workers and lords in Europe for example because now that half the population was wiped out

workers were all of a sudden pretty scarce and with this higher demand for labor power for negotiation of wages

shifted squarely into the hands of the surviving workers ok that's what you need to know about the environmental

consequences of trade you're an AP World History this year then subscribe to the channel and I'll help you get an A in

your class and a 5 on your exam if you like hearing about fleas honking black death onto human beings then hit the

like button and let me know I'm Laura