Africa And China Similarities

Throughout world history, we see many different countries with a wide variety of similarities and differences. Two places like this are Africa and China. The two aren’t even remotely close together, but had similar ways of living, both with their own touch on it, relative specifically to their cultures. These differences and similarities are shown through religion, their social set-up, trade, and social classes. One of the biggest ways to compare and contrast Africa and China is through trade. Trade was very important to both cultures. Africa was basically built on trade. Trade began to grow in Africa in Ghana and by 700, it was making people rich. Two things that were very important to trade in Ghana were gold and salt, which were considered

In Africa, there weren’t many obvious social differences. Obviously, there were rulers that were higher up that any others, religious scholars, and at the bottom would be the enslaved people they traded. Social classes were much more pronounced in China. No matter what, women were always considered beneath men. They would go as far as to bind the feet up upper class girls to have them hobble along while walking to make them seem even lesser than men. Other than that, as the power of noble families faded, wealthy scholar-officials form and new upper class which was named the gentry. After that came urban middle class, then laborers, soldiers, and finally peasants at the bottom of the social

In Africa, the societies were set up as hunter-gatherers, stateless societies, or Muslim states. In hunter-gatherer societies, the men hunted and the women gathered vegetables to provide. In a stateless society, there was no central system of power and in a Muslim state, religion was directly linked with the government. In China, there are settled communities and also nomads. The nomads have no specific place to live and tend to move around based on where their food supply moves. Settled communities and the nomads often interact but it can either be peaceful, such as trade, or the nomads would raid towns. China didn’t have as many different types of societies like Africa did. As this paper has shown, both Africa and China have similarities and differences, all of which are not shown. However, the ones that were expressed in this paper are religion, trade, social classes, and the different ways the societies are set up. These are all very important to the culture of both Africa and China and helped pave the way for many aspects of everyday