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How Did The Silk Road Affect Society

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The Silk Road has been around since before the Common Era and is still used to this day although in a modernized form (Puchner). Through the centuries it has been a facilitator for the expansion and diffusion cultures. More than just goods found their way through Silk Road, ideas, culture, religion, and even disease and conquest floated through these trade routes. Although whether their distribution was intended or not is up for debate but what is for sure is that their impact changed the course of history for many societies.
There were intended consequences of the Silk Road such as expansion of trade routes and trading territories along with the exchange of goods. Many goods were exchanged all along the nearly 4,600 miles of trade routes …show more content…

One of the biggest contributions was from China and their paper making techniques. This made documentation and record keeping a possibility. Thanks to the paper making technique getting around we now have fragments of ideas of how things were like on the Silk Road. Other ideas like the compass, stirrups, and gunpowder advanced military operations all over Europe and Eurasia (p. 257). Religions that were spread through traveling monks and merchants also subsequently caused technological revolutions. An example of this is the sacred Buddhist texts that arrived in China from India; these texts encouraged the development of printing in China (p. 223). The spread of religions was not intended nor were the consequences of conversion and diffusion but they impacted local cultures through arts and belief systems. Many of these things were beneficial to cultures and communities. Advancements were made whether through technology or economy and cultures began seeing a wide diversity of raw materials, goods, and technology that they each adopted in their own unique way to fit their own unique …show more content…

This led to fighting and attacks on traders by hostile nomads and bandits. They had found out about the precious goods that were coming so tentatively close to their lands and they took advantage of this to plunder trade caravans. . For defense against plundering their caravans, merchants had to travel with defensive forces, which spiked the cost of trade. The Han dynasty put up forts and defensive walls an effort to curb attacks from the Xiongnu and protect the trade routes from further strain

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