The whole world,
told well.

Geography, climate, and disease set the stage and rewrite the script. The CED expects you to trace how the environment shapes human institutions — and how human institutions reshape the environment back, with consequences nobody planned.

• Unit 1 — Song China — Champa rice (from Vietnam) doubles rice yields and powers China’s first urban revolution.
• Unit 2 — Mongol disease network — The Black Death moves along Mongol-secured trade routes — a trade network becomes a disease network.
• Unit 4 — Columbian Exchange — Smallpox kills ~90% of indigenous populations; American crops remake European diets and demographics.
• Unit 6 — Coal & climate — Industrial coal extraction launches the 200-year experiment that produced today’s atmospheric CO₂.

Religions, philosophies, art, and science cross-pollinate when worlds meet. CDI questions ask how ideas spread, how they change in transit, and how local cultures contest or transform them.

• Unit 1 — Sufism — Sufi missionaries spread Islam into Central Asia, India, and West Africa by adapting to local cultures.
• Unit 3 — Mughal religious synthesis — Akbar invites Hindu, Jain, Christian, and Zoroastrian scholars to his court and proclaims a syncretic faith (Din-i-Ilahi).
• Unit 5 — Atlantic ideas — Enlightenment concepts of consent and rights cross the Atlantic and power revolutions in the U.S., France, and Haiti.
• Unit 9 — Globalization — K-pop, Bollywood, and Premier League football show cultural production no longer flowing only from West to rest.

Empires, states, and the strategies they use to legitimize and sustain themselves. GOV asks: who has authority, where does it come from, and how is it enforced?

• Unit 1 — Song bureaucracy — China runs the world’s largest empire through a meritocratic civil service exam — for centuries before Europe.
• Unit 3 — Gunpowder empires — Ottoman Janissaries (devshirme) build a slave-soldier elite loyal only to the Sultan, bypassing rival aristocracy.
• Unit 5 — Nation-state — The French Revolution invents the modern idea of citizens, not subjects — popular sovereignty as state legitimacy.
• Unit 7 — Totalitarianism — Soviet, Nazi, and fascist states show what 20th-century mass media + bureaucracy can do to scale up control.
• Unit 9 — Supranational — UN, EU, WTO, IMF — partial sovereignty pooled at the international level for problems no single state can solve alone.

Trade networks, labor systems, and the rise (and limits) of capitalism. ECN traces the economic structures that shape everything else — politics, demographics, family life.

• Unit 2 — Indian Ocean — Monsoon winds + dhows organize 1,500 years of maritime trade linking East Africa, India, Southeast Asia, China.
• Unit 4 — Atlantic system — The triangular trade integrates three continents into one economy — built on ~12.5 million enslaved Africans.
• Unit 6 — Industrial capitalism — Factories, wage labor, and joint-stock corporations replace guild and household production.
• Unit 9 — Globalization — Container shipping + WTO rules + Chinese manufacturing build the global supply chain economy after 1980.

Family, gender, class, ethnicity — and how power is distributed (or contested) along those lines. SIO is how you analyze who wins and who loses inside a society, not just between societies.

• Unit 1 — Foot binding — Song-era foot binding signals elite female status while physically constraining women’s labor and mobility.
• Unit 4 — Casta system — Spanish America’s casta hierarchy ranks people by ancestry — the racial pyramid the Atlantic world inherits.
• Unit 5 — French Revolution & class — The Third Estate (~98% of France) overthrows the privileged First and Second Estates — modern class politics begin.
• Unit 9 — Identity movements — Civil rights, women’s lib, decolonization, LGBTQ+ rights — 20th-century movements rewriting who counts as a full citizen.

From gunpowder and steam to the internet — and the unforeseen consequences each time. TEC asks how invention reshapes power, labor, war, and daily life.

• Unit 1 — Song innovations — Gunpowder, movable type, paper money, magnetic compass — all emerge in Song China and slowly diffuse west.
• Unit 4 — Caravels & navigation — Lateen sail + astrolabe + magnetic compass let Iberians cross the Atlantic — and conquer two continents.
• Unit 6 — Steam power — The steam engine moves textile factories from waterwheels — and powers railroads, ships, and the Industrial Revolution.
• Unit 7 — Industrial war — Machine guns, tanks, aircraft, and chemical weapons turn WWI into the first industrial-scale slaughter.
• Unit 9 — Internet — Networked computers + smartphones rewire commerce, politics, and information — with consequences still unfolding.