domestication of the camel

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The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Contents Preface 1 Seven Ages of Globalization The Seven Ages The Acceleration of Change Economic Scale and the Pace of Change Malthusian Pessimism The Gradual Transformation to Urban Life The Interplay of Geography, Technology, and Institutions The Favorable Geographies Geopolitics and Globalization Looking Back to See Forward 2 The Paleolithic Age (70,000–10,000 BCE) The First Age of Globalization Cultural Acceleration Human Society in the Upper Paleolithic Some Lessons from the Paleolithic Age 3 The Neolithic Age (10,000–3000 BCE) Diffusion of Agriculture Within Ecological Zones The Early Alluvial Civilizations of Eurasia The Lucky Latitudes Some Lessons from the Neolithic Age 4 The Equestrian Age (3000–1000 BCE) Animal Domestication Domestication of the Donkey and the Horse The Domestication of the Camel and Camelids The Metal Ages Comparing Old World and New World Developments The Yamnaya Breakthrough in Eurasia The Early Equestrian States Key Development Breakthroughs in the Fertile Crescent Some Lessons from the Equestrian Age 5 The Classical Age (1000 BCE–1500 CE) The Axial Age Thalassocracy and Tellurocracy The Emergence of the Classical Land-Based Empires The Han Empire The Developed World as of 100 CE Global Trade Within the Lucky Latitudes The Fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam The Remarkable Song Dynasty of China The Last Hurrahs of the Steppe Conquerors Some Lessons from the Classical Age 6 The Ocean Age (1500–1800) The Great Chinese Reversal The North Atlantic Quest for Ocean Navigation The Columbian Exchange The Gunpowder Age and the High Seas The New European Age of Inquiry The Birth of Global Capitalism Europe’s Scramble for Global Empire Insatiable Greed of the Empire Builders The Intertwining of State and Capital Indigenous Populations and African Slaves in the New World Feeding Europe’s Factories: Cotton Global Empire and Global War Adam Smith’s Summation of the Age of Global Empire Some Lessons from the Ocean Age 7 The Industrial Age (1800–2000) From the Organic Economy to the Energy-Rich Economy Why Did Industrialization Start in Britain?

It is a pack animal, able to transport goods long distances. It is a saddle animal, for use in warfare and farming (as in the herding of farm animals). It is a draft animal, able to pull wheeled vehicles. It has endurance, intelligence, and great speed. In short, it has played a decisive role in economic development. The Domestication of the Camel and Camelids Species of the camel family (Camelidae) have also played an important role in the more extreme climates of deserts and high plateaus. In the Old World, two species predominate: the one-humped dromedary of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, and the two-humped Bactrian camel of Central Asia, including Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Mongolia’s Gobi Desert.


pages: 565 words: 164,405

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein

Admiral Zheng, asset allocation, bank run, Benoit Mandelbrot, British Empire, call centre, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, cotton gin, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, domestication of the camel, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, ice-free Arctic, imperial preference, income inequality, intermodal, James Hargreaves, John Harrison: Longitude, Khyber Pass, low skilled workers, non-tariff barriers, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Port of Oakland, refrigerator car, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, upwardly mobile, working poor, zero-sum game

Already extinct in North America, and quickly headed for extinction in Eurasia, the camel was first valued, about six thousand years ago, solely for its milk. Not until twenty-five hundred years later, around 1500 BC, would humans begin to exploit the camel's ability to carry hundreds of pounds of cargo across otherwise impenetrable territory. Without the domestication of the camel, the trans-Asian silk and trans-Arabian incense routes would have been impossible. It is a little-known fact that the progenitors of the modern camel (along with the horse) originated in North America and migrated east across the Bering Strait land bridge to Asia. Although swift herds of camels or horses might manage the perilous journey from the heartland of North America to that of Eurasia in a matter of decades, it was a much tougher trek for fragile plant species from a temperate area.

Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.21 Trade's modern scribblers-David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin, Wolfgang Stolper, and Paul Samuelson-will help us to understand the massive upheavals seen in our ever more integrated global system. Although the structure of this book is chronological, its many interwoven narratives will supersede the flow of mere dates and events. For example, two closely related stories, the south Arabian incense trade and the domestication of the camel, both span thousands of years. At the other extreme, the memoirs of medieval travelers who left us extensive and intact records of their journeys-Marco Polo, the Moroccan legal scholar Ibn Battuta, and the Portuguese apothecary Tome Pires- will provide isolated but detailed snapshots of world trade spanning only a few decades.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

DATA SOURCES: Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—for Now (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). Trade among Fixed Production / Consumption Clusters Trade as it is conceived of today—namely, made-here-sold-there goods moving among fixed regions—rose during this stage. The game-changing innovations were the domestication of the camel (around 1000 BCE), refinements of sailing technology, and advances in coastal navigation. Archaeological finds and literary sources shine some light on which goods were traded. For example, a fourteenth-century BCE shipwreck discovered off the western coast of Turkey contained copper and tin ingots (the ingredients of bronze), glass beads, ebony wood, ivory, tortoise shells, ostrich eggshells, ceramic jars filled with resin, and some weapons and tools as well as Egyptian jewelry.


pages: 401 words: 122,457

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

British Empire, clean water, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Honoré de Balzac, invention of movable type, long peace, Mahatma Gandhi, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

., when the camel replaced the horse. The camel was a native of North America, though it became extinct there two million years ago. Around 3000 B.C. , relatively late in the history of animal domestication, camels were domesticated in the Middle East. The wild species has vanished. Between the domestication of the camel and its use in the Sahara, several millennia passed. But once the domestic camel made its Sahara debut, its use spread quickly. By the Middle Ages, caravans of 40,000 camels carried salt from Taoudenni to Timbuktu, a 435-mile journey taking as long as one month. Since then, continuing to this day, caravans of camels have moved bulk goods across the Sahara to western and central Africa.


pages: 869 words: 239,167

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen

3D printing, 8-hour work day, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-work, antiwork, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, demographic transition, deskilling, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, European colonialism, factory automation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, megastructure, minimum wage unemployment, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, pension reform, phenotype, post-work, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, reshoring, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, stakhanovite, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, two and twenty, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, working poor

Sheep- and goat-herders, using donkeys for transport, lived in the outlying districts of agricultural areas and were engaged in agriculture as well. As a consequence of the desiccation of the ‘Saharo-Arabian belt’ that began about 2500 BCE, some pastoralists became nomads, which was also made possible with the domestication of the camel in roughly 1500 BCE. The animal (including ‘milch camels’) was mentioned as being among the stock of the biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. These animals became as indispensable for the Near Eastern nomads as the horse for those of the Eurasian Steppe.26 In contrast to the Eurasian Steppe, where sheep and horses were herded together, here we see separate pasturing of, on the one hand, sheep and goats, herds that had to be watered every 3 to 4 days and so could not move more than 15–20 kilometres from a watering place, and on the other, camels – recall the aphorism by a Polish poet that ‘a camel can work a week without drinking, while a man can drink for a week without working’.27 This separate herding entailed intergroup and intertribal specialization.


Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Ayatollah Khomeini, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, invention of movable type, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, liberation theology, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, New Urbanism, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, plutocrats, post-truth, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

The Ottomans were more immediately successful in building their own line, the Hijaz Railway, funded by donations from around the Muslim world and designed to carry pilgrims – and, of course, troops – from Damascus to Medina. Announced in 1900 and finished in 1908, it was the first improvement in Arabian overland travel since the Queen of Sheba; indeed, since the domestication of the camel. From pack-camel to pilgrim express had taken three millennia; the Hijaz Railway would run for less than nine years. As the Great War ground into action, Britain decided both to derail the Turks’ thrust to the south by destroying their shiny new Arabian train set and, more importantly, to sidetrack them from the conflict in the Fertile Crescent by provoking an Arabian tribal uprising that would be known as the Arab Revolt.


pages: 1,993 words: 478,072

The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans by David Abulafia

Admiral Zheng, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial rule, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of the americas, domestication of the camel, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land reform, lone genius, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, megacity, new economy, out of africa, p-value, Peace of Westphalia, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Difficulties in navigating past the reefs and shoals of the Red Sea were one discouragement; the possibility of using land routes was another. One could reach Eritrea by river and land, and one could reach Arabia by following the coast of western Arabia overland. This traffic was rendered much easier by the domestication of the camel, whose date is disputed but may have been achieved, at least in parts of Arabia, by 1000 BC .37 Competition between land and sea routes to south Arabia and the facing shores of Africa would last many centuries. It was not always clear what comparative advantage a sea route offered those seeking frankincense and myrrh.