Trade is a big part of today's world but it all had to start somewhere so let's look at it thousands of years ago is actually quite similar to today's trade industry just on a much smaller scale. As of today, products go from one part of the world to the other and back just to make one shirt or phone and in fact this is cheaper for major companies to outsource for example, Apple builds phones in china, apple is based in the USA and when china done making the phone they send it back to the USA to be sold. Trade is cheaper and faster today than it has ever been before. Today's ocean trading routes are larger and faster than ever. These routes can get massive quantities of bulk goods like timber and cotton from one side of the world in a matter …show more content…
The silk road was the biggest land trade route of its time starting around the 2nd century BC and going to the 14th century AD. This trade route made went all from europe to asia. The silk road major cities along the silk roads was Xi’an, Dunhuang, Guangzhou (all 3 in China), Mathura, Taxila, kashgar (all in India) and constantinople in europe just to name a few. This trade route took many months was expensive and unsafe. Trade was unsafe on the silk road because of Mongols who commonly attack people moving along the trade route because of this there was only one way to safely travel and this was to travel with an army. This was one reason that trade along the silk road was bad, but it was the best option at the time. With the goods being protected by army's, military technology was traded like the crossbow from china to rome during the zhou dynasty and gunpowder, which was invented “ in the 9th century in China, and the earliest record of a written formula for gunpowder appears in the 11th century Song dynasty text, Wujing Zongyao. This discovery led to the invention of fireworks and the earliest gunpowder weapons in China.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder). Today trade on land isn't really trade at all it's just the transfer of goods from one place to another like the oranges in California to here in MI on truck. In today's world we are used to getting what we want right away instead of having to wait like most …show more content…
Today trade is faster and cheaper than it has ever been before. To give an example of how fast trade is today an average size cargo ship traveling at an average speed of 20 knots a cargo ship can cross the atlantic ocean in 6 days. Now the average size of a cargo ship is 1,300 feet. This is huge compared to the ships in the indian ocean trade. These ships can take 10,000 to 15,000 TEU of cargo each trip. These massive ships make trade so much more efficient. If we now look over at trade along land. We use huge tracks to take goods from one side of content to the other in a matter of weeks which is so much faster than the months it would take in the silk road. One interesting thing about our global trade is companies send their factories to the cheapest places in the world to be made. This means that even though the items being made in say china or indian will mostly be sold in the USA they are made in those countries because over it is cheaper. There is one more very interesting thing about the trade of today is the types of products made require items from all over the world. This is unlike anything before. All the items for a shirt may come from 15 different place in the world made in a 3rd world country and then sent to major countries for sale. Then these shirts after people get tired of them or grow out of the shirt it will most likely be sent back to the country it was made as charity. Today trade makes everthing we have in this room