--- title: What trade carried: tomatoes, tea, horses, words, religions and diseases — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «What trade carried: tomatoes, tea, horses, words, religions and diseases», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Open the kitchen cupboard and you open a map of the world: the tomatoes in the pasta sauce came f --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / What trade carried: tomatoes, tea, hor… # What trade carried: tomatoes, tea, horses, words, religions and diseases Lesson 71 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 14 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/0/) — Open the kitchen cupboard and you open a map of the world: the tomatoes in the pasta sauce came from the Americas, the tea from China, the coffee from Ethiopia and Yemen, the sugar from New Guinea and India, and the chocolate from Mexico. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/1/) — After 1492 ships began to link the Americas with the rest of the world, and plants, animals, people and germs crossed the ocean both ways; historians call this the Columbian Exchange. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/4/) — So when someone says a food is «always» from somewhere, ask: since when, and who brought it? - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/5/) — Tomatoes come from the Americas; they reached Europe in the 1500s, Italians first grew them as curiosities, and tomato sauce became common in Italy only in the 1700s and 1800s. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/6/) — Potatoes were first grown in the Andes of South America thousands of years ago, reached Europe in the 1500s and spread across Europe, Ukraine included, in the 1700s and 1800s; when potato disease struck Ireland in 1845–1852, about a million people died and about a million left. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/7/) — Chilli peppers come from the Americas and reached Asia in the 1500s with Portuguese and other traders; red, spicy kimchi became common in Korea in the 1700s. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/8/) — Sugar cane was first grown in New Guinea, and people in India first made crystal sugar; from the 1500s Europeans set up sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean worked by enslaved Africans. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/9/) — Tea comes from China, where it was drunk for thousands of years; it reached Britain in the 1600s, and from the 1830s British companies grew tea in India. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/10/) — Coffee drinking began in Ethiopia and Yemen and spread through the Muslim world; coffee houses opened in Istanbul in the 1500s and in London in 1652. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/11/) — People in Mexico and Central America drank chocolate, often bitter and spicy, for thousands of years; the Aztecs used cacao beans as money, and an English firm sold one of the first chocolate bars in 1847. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/12/) — Horses died out in the Americas about 10,000 years ago and came back with the Spanish in the 1500s; peoples like the Comanche and Lakota became great horse riders, and a 2023 study with Indigenous scholars suggested horses spread on the Plains earlier than European records say. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/13/) — After 1492 smallpox, measles and other diseases reached the Americas, where people had no protection; in some places the population fell by up to nine-tenths, though the exact numbers are debated. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/14/) — Most languages call tea «te» or «cha»: words like «tea» came by sea from the coast of China, where people said «te», and words like «chai» and «çay» came by land routes from places that said «cha». - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/71-what-trade-carried-tomatoes-tea-horses-words-and-diseases/15/) — Islam spread to Indonesia mostly through traders and teachers from the 1200s onwards, and Indonesia now has more Muslims than any other country; Buddhism also travelled from India to China and Japan along trade routes. - ← previous: [Trade: why people swap, and the great trade routes](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/70-trade-why-people-swap-and-the-great-trade-routes/) - next →: [Why some places grew rich](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/72-why-some-places-grew-rich/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)