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.
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