Global Trade Networks

This lecture covers the main terrestrial obstacles such as high mountains, boreal forests, deserts, and equatorial forests, as well as the primary circulation axes including maritime and land routes. It also discusses the empires of England, France, Portugal, Spain, Russia/USSR, Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Denmark, Netherlands, United States, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Japan in 1885. The lecture further explores the coal production in England from 1850 to 1864, the German residual space, demilitarized zones, and exclusion zones. It analyzes global goods trade in 2010, emphasizing intraregional and interregional trade patterns. Additionally, it presents a world map showing the Human Development Index by country in 2013, and compares the sizes of Japan and Antarctica.

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Related concepts (45)

Exploring Humans’ Space

Explorer comment la géographie, la cartographie, l’urbanisation et la justice spatiale jouent un rôle dans la compréhension de l’espace des humains et des sociétés.

Trade route

A trade route is a logistical network identified as a series of pathways and stoppages used for the commercial transport of cargo. The term can also be used to refer to trade over bodies of water. Allowing goods to reach distant markets, a single trade route contains long-distance arteries, which may further be connected to smaller networks of commercial and noncommercial transportation routes. Among notable trade routes was the Amber Road, which served as a dependable network for long-distance trade.

Coal mining

Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United Kingdom and South Africa, a coal mine and its structures are a colliery, a coal mine is called a 'pit', and the above-ground structures are a 'pit head'. In Australia, "colliery" generally refers to an underground coal mine.

Germany

Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second-most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between the Baltic and North seas to the north, and the Alps to the south. Its 16 constituent states are bordered by Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, and France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the west.

Coal in China

China is the largest producer and consumer of coal and the largest user of coal-generated electricity in the world. The share of coal in the Chinese energy mix declined to 55% in 2021 according to the US Energy Information Agency. The Chinese central government has clamped down on the pace of new construction of coal plants and shifted to renewable, nuclear and natural gas sources. At the same time, coal consumption reached new heights in China with carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired electricity production estimated to top 4.

Coal

Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is a type of fossil fuel, formed when dead plant matter decays into peat and is converted into coal by the heat and pressure of deep burial over millions of years. Vast deposits of coal originate in former wetlands called coal forests that covered much of the Earth's tropical land areas during the late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) and Permian times.