When Asia Was The World Chapter Summary

From 500 to 1500 CE, Asia was the most powerful economic force on the planet. It was in Asia that mathematicians invented zero and algebra, astronomers learned to track the stars more accurately and invented the astrolabe for navigation, and poets and writers produced literature that is still well thought of today. The history of Asia is a broad subject to cover in just four to five pages. The entire book of Qiu Jin Hailstork’s Interpreting the Asian Past covers the history of Asia. However, Stewart Gordon’s When Asia Was the World does a great job with covering the main aspects of the history of Asia in a simpler way. Each chapter is broken down into different aspects through a series of memoirs. When Asia Was the World explains how religions, philosophy, and science each helped create Asia into the most dominant force in the world.
Many find it surprising that India is the heartland of Buddhism, rather than China. Buddhism became a major religious and cultural institution throughout most of Asia, while it declined in India, the country of its birth. The reformative growth of Hinduism and the Muslim invasions in the Northwest of India causes the decline of Buddhism in India (Hailstork 13). All of the sacred places were thousands of miles away from China. Therefore, it was necessary for one to experience and learn
The basic technology passed down the Silk Road into the Middle East with the Abbasids in about 750 CE (Gordon 42). Within a century, paper markets and many paper mills increasingly grew in Baghdad (Gordon 42). According to Interpreting the Asian Past, in addition to paper, goods such as gold, silver, wine, silk, and lacquers from China; pistachio nuts, dates, and saffron powder from Persia; ivory, spices, precious stone from India; and cloth and glass bottles from Egypt were picked up by merchants along the routes of the Silk Road (Hailstork 64). Trade routes flourished all throughout Asia and to the