Chapter 15(2)

Fur. Fur is still around today, but the fight for it isn't nearly as difficult as it was back in the era this chapter talks about. We are now past discussing the spice trade, and are now talking about some of the difficulties in the fur trade. Of course, fur was seen and a commodity and still is. Fur comes off of animals which are sourced as a population, and when that population is diminished, so too does the demand increase while the supply decreases. It becomes a rarity, and then it becomes a fight for it. It is largely due to the Europeans that these fur bearing animals are becoming rare. Fur trading was almost a sport competed internationally, and each team was most dominant in their own home court. The French were best in the St. Lawrence Valley, the British in the Hudson Bay area, and the Dutch in the Hudson River (Which is now New York.)
The Europeans were definitely cheaters in this sport, since they would merely wait until the Indians would bring them the furs or skins to then trade them for other tools of British making. Native Americans were essentially a cheap labor force for the British.
Even though the Native Americans were protected for some time from slavery from the British because of their important role and their capabilities in hunting fur bearing animals, that didn't protect them from the new diseases that the Europeans brought with them.

Chapter Fifteen

Global Commerce is the title of this chapter, and it immediately warns me about what the rest of the chapter is about to be about, if that makes sense. Since commercial is a derivative of the word commerce, I know that this chapter is going to be about global business, so to speak. United Nations type stuff, international relations and things like that.
This chapter spans 300 years, and simply talks about a pair of countries and their methods of interaction and what they traded. Just like I mentioned in the fourteenth chapter, Strayer makes a sly hint at how Columbus wasn't quite as awesome as we all thought he was. Definitely not deserving of his own day off.
Anyway, the Europeans and the Asians start this chapter off by trading cinnamon, nutmeg, mace cloves and pepper, which were were widely used as condiments and preservatives and were sometimes used as aphrodisiacs. The Europeans were definitely aware of this trading, but were largely unaware of how it worked. For a while, a lot of this trading had seemed to just trickle in to the Europeans hands. The first major problem with this was that the Europeans knew that the source of all these goods and condiments and even aphrodisiacs were Muslim hands. So naturally, methods were created to circumvent these circumstances. A black market, but a little bright, perhaps a gray market suitable for the Europeans who chose to send a ship to Egypt to collect goods. Aboard this ship was one of the only commodities acceptable to the commodity-wealthy Asians; gold, or silver.

Chapter 14

Broken down and inside a nutshell, this whole chapter is about how Columbus isn't quite as awesome as we all think he is, and in some opinions, how he doesn't even deserver to have his own dedicated day, since he only found America by accident.
Secondly, in the same nutshell is the rise of the Russian Empire, and how that was awesome in itself, although it wasn't quite deserving of a holiday.
One of my favorite parts of this chapter was the quick discussion about how when Russia changed into an empire, it changed the fundamentals of Russia itself. When it became a cultural melting pot, the number of actual Russians diminished proportionately.
The Russian Empire also lasted for such a long time, compared with other Empires such as the Spanish, Portuguese, and British Empires. It lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.