ABSTRACT
All world historians note several key changes during the centuries between 500 and 1450, after the fall of the classical empires. Themes include the spread of civilization, as a form of human organization, to additional regions, and the splintering of the Mediterranean world. They include growing trade contacts, mediated particularly by Islamic merchants from the Middle East. The final centuries of the postclassical period include further international exchanges, in Afro-Eurasia, under the aegis of the Mongol empires and then, very briefly, the great Chinese commercial voyages of the early fifteenth century. Imitation of established societies by newcomers – Japan deliberately copying China, Russia looking to the Byzantine Empire – also mark this period. Finally, from the late classical period onward, the spread of the great world religions, the missionary faiths of Buddhism, Christianity and the latest and (at that point) most successful entrant, Islam, mark an important set of cultural and institutional changes throughout much of Asia, Africa and Europe. All of this occurred, it should be remembered, in economies that were still predominantly agricultural: so we’re continuing to examine possible changes in childhood within the basic agricultural context; and the spread of agriculture itself – for example, southward and eastward in Africa, with the Bantu migrations – brought fundamental change in its wake for certain regions.
