Anthropology writing, due by today 11 pm.

This week we start to explore the historical periods that are generally seen as when globalization 'takes off,' and really intensifies. After roughly the year 1500, several processes get underway that would render much more extensive and intensive the long-distance circulation of people, commodities, ideas, languages, plants, animals, diseases...you name it.

Connections and encounters among peoples and societies are a constant feature of world history, producing patterns of change and continuity. No culture is or was ever static; cultural change is a major feature of human adaptability to a changing environment. After about 1500, the pace of cultural change quickened and the impact of globalization on cultural realms seemed more startling as goods, ideas, and peoples moved rapidly around the globe. The period between 1450 and 1750 saw sweeping cultural and intellectual developments, including the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, Neoconfucianism, major exchanges between large empires (like the Mughal and Ottoman), and a new breed of world traveler. Maritime trade and technology brought about the globalization of labor and the creation of an African diaspora — and carried with it a wave of changing cultural patterns with economic, demographic and environmental consequences.

Food has always played a variety of complex roles in human societies and it is a great lens on globalization. In the earliest societies, the desire to share food was one marker of humanity. As communities became more complex, food became invested with a wide variety of meanings that varied widely depending on the time, the place, and the particular food. For this reason, what was the well-to-do Englishman's exotic delicacy could well be another's taboo. Also for this reason, food conveyed what was unique to specific cultures: As one nineteenth-century French food pontiff rightly claimed, "Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are." Yet while the history of food can reveal historical differences between societies, it also reveals a shared human need, and how all societies have mediated this need through the lenses of status, class, and culture.

One of our videos traces some dramatic changes in the ways food was produced and consumed as a result of global connections after 1500. These changes were as obvious in the Caribbean as they were on the opposite side of the world in China. Indeed, both regions represent key places where the introduction of new foods produced extraordinary changes in culture, economy, and demography. After 1500, in fact, the histories of both regions cannot be understood without reference to the wider world.

In the three centuries after 1500, patterns of food production and consumption were the engines that drove global processes. Cultures of consumption could shape population movements, declines, or increases. They could also shape identity and express cultural values. Finally, they nearly always enriched some at the expense of many others. In recent centuries, changes in food production and consumption have only intensified, and have helped to shape the many flavors of our global community.

There are also very important and interesting developments in how historians and other scholars are understanding what's often called the 'rise of the West'.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a decided shift in the global balance of power. Historians agree that Europeans burst onto the world scene at this time, yet these scholars are widely divided in their views about the reasons why Europeans became such a powerful global force.

For many years, historians believed that the rise of the West was a natural, inevitable, and largely positive development that resulted from the diffusion of superior European technologies, ideologies, and institutions to the rest of the world. Now, however, scholars increasingly frame the story of the rise of the West in a less Eurocentric world historical context. What is Eurocentrism? It is a bias that many of us have (myself included!), in which we tend to view the world as if the most 'natural' or universal way of living is basically a modern, Western way. It isn't so much that modern, Western ways of life are wrong, but if we only use them as models, and project them back into other periods of history, or onto peoples who may have had other motivations, we can easily falsify history. So Eurocentrism can insinuate its way into our understanding of world history if we treat world history as basically all leading up as a prelude to Western world domination, as if it was inevitable, and happened solely as a result of developments within Europe, rather than as a result of much larger connections, flows and developments of which Europe was a part.

The other video traces the changes in the ways historians view the rise of the West, as well as the significance of those changes. In the past, historians have explained Europe's rise-as expressed in European global dominance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-by focusing on maritime achievements in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This interpretation has also generally viewed Europe's rise as a result of unique European cultural factors, like so-called Western 'genius,' etc.

More recent interpretations, however, have been more nuanced about Western dominance and have attempted to place that dominance in a global historical context. In the 1970s, for example, world systems theory sought to view European dominance as a product of the expansionary nature of capitalism. In the last decade, scholars with opposing views about when, how, and why the West rose have hotly debated new interpretations. Even more recently, new comparative scholarship has sought to locate Europe's rise within a global trade network long dominated by China. Taken as a whole, this recent work within the field of world history has revised the interpretation and meaning of the rise of the West.

Read: Steger, pp. 29-37

Watch: "Food, Demographics and Culture" and "Rethinking the Rise of the West". [In the pages that open, in the Left side menu, at the bottom, click on VoD "View the Video Online."]

 Questions：

Number your responses. Write in complete sentences.

1. What do historians mean by the “Columbian Exchange”? Discuss this using the example of sugar. Where did it originate? Where did Europeans start to plant it? Using what production system? What movements of people were involved in this? What ecological changes? What changes in tastes were brought about by the increased production of this commodity? Give an example.

 

2. What three concepts are useful in understanding the so-called “Rise of the West”? Define each, and discuss the example of each given in the video. Then give an example different from the ones given in the video, and discuss your example.