The Silk Road Research Paper

Have you ever wondered how important trade really is in the world today and how it impacted human health? The Silk Road was a network of trade routes where goods, ideas, technologies, and diseases were passed along throughout Eurasia on camel caravans. The name “The Silk Road” can be misleading because silk was not the only item that was traded on this trade route. Other items, such as metals, gems, glass, horses, and spices were important items of trade (Upshur). Many people think trade only has a positive impact during this time, but they don’t think about the negative impact of trade on human health, such as diseases, weather, and people who were trying to steal from them. The impact of the Silk Road was for the worse of human health. Yes, there was many positive …show more content…
Technology flowed along the Silk Road. For example, gunpowder and the spinning wheel, which were Chinese inventions (B. A. Skeen). The religions of Buddhism and Manichaeism also traveled along the Silk Road and became dominant in inner Asia before the arrival of Islam. The spread of technology throughout the Silk Road had a negative impact of human health. The negative effects of the spread of technology were the disappearance of carts and carriages to the decay of Roman roads that made wheeled transport clumsy, prone to breakdown, a target for brigands, less flexible for changes in itineraries, costlier if a wagon load rather than a camel load were lost or destroyed, more dangerous, and more expensive than animal transport (Cosman). This was a bad thing because if any of these things happened, the people who were traveling would need to try to find a new camel, or even be punished because things on the camel caravan got lost. Human health was influenced by this because it showed many people were struggling since technology was influencing them and making them become stressed about the circumstances that they had to deal