Transforming the World Through Commerce

Commerce is what distinguishes the "old world" versus the "new world," (Strayer 670). In the old world, most countries were isolated. One grows up in a certain culture dependent on the country they are born in. Then this culture is passed down to future generations. However, in the new world, countries now started to interact with each other. They started to trade ideas, fur, food, textiles, money, weaponary, people, even other countries. This is known as commerce, otherwise known as large scale trading. The first regions to participate in commerce were Europe and Asia in the Indian Ocean commerce. Asia had many goods that the Europeans wanted, spices, silver, gold, cotton silk, people. Europe however had nothing of interest to the Asians (Strayer 673). This led to the Europeans, specificaly the Portuguese to use force. In essence they cheated the trade system. They used their powerful naval forces and strategic militray manuevers to conquer small Asian states to create posts for trade. They stole and ransaked. This became the norm, Europeans would come into weaker countries and steal their goods. However not only did the Europeans steal goods, they stole people. After, a new commerce emerged, the Atlantic Slave trade, where Europeans would capture people from African societies (Strayer 687). These African people would be transported mainly to the Americas to live their lives as slaves. The Americas were "discovered" by the Europeans then later colonized for American goods. After they colonized, slavery boomed in the Americas. Slavery not only took form in simple manual labor. It now had many forms. One slave could working in a household while another could be a sex slave. There were slaves in farms, businesses, even as high as in military and politics (Strayer 688). Slaves were fundamental in the developing American economy, they were free labor. With free labor, work could be done without losing profit. This was obviously great for the slave owners but horrible for the slaves. Slaves were treated as non-human demeaned to status of animal. Soon the Europeans and Americans realized this harsh treatment of slaves was inhumane and therefore outlawed slavery. However, the ideas of people who were once slaves, African Americans, are present today. Many African Americans are victims of stereotypes, discrimination, and ill treatment because the preconceived notion that African Americans are inhuman is still present today. In America especially, even in present day, there are unarmed African Americans who are shot without any consequence. This is because the Atlantic Slave trade brought not only people but ideas of a whole people. Despite this, there are some positives from this commerce. Africans brought into America brought their culture. They brought their food, language, spices and more. Their culture is alive in America. We would not have that without the Atlantic Slave trade. Commerce has brought great ideas, new cultures but it also had negative consequences like slavery and ill conceived notions of a group of people. One can not grow crops without growing weeds. Same with commerce, one can not only take the good from it, some bad must come of it too. This way we can learn from commerce what we want as a people and what we need to reject.