For Teachers: Lessons

Rethinking the rise of the West: Global Commodities

Konstantin Georgidis, Canterbury School, Ft. Myers, Florida

INTRODUCTION

Instructional Objectives

1. Identify the reasons for the development of a network of global commodities in the 16th century.
2. Identify, describe and critically assess the linkages of international trade that characterized the process of globalization that resulted from the development of a network of trade in silver in the Pacific Ocean basin.
3. Determine the effects of the establishment and the functioning of this trade on the regions which participated in it and, especially China.
4. Assess China’s importance for the world economy
5. Assess claims in current historiography of China’s modernity and the rejection of a Eurocentric world history.