What were the struggles and successes in overcoming isolation?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Around the Indian Ocean, increased traffic brought areas in East Africa and Southeast Asia out of isolation and kept India rich, notwithstandingits political troubles. Despite the heroic efforts of the Norse in the Atlantic, the Thule Inuit in the Arctic, and the Polynesians in the Pacific, the wealth-creating effects of sustained transoceanic or interoceanic commerce could not yet be reproduced outside the region of the monsoons. In the Americas and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the arresting effects of isolation could not be overcome. Cultural contacts between Mesoamerica and parts of North America helped, for a while, to produce spectacular experiments in building states and modifying environments. But the networks were still too fragile and temporary for the effects to endure. Although India remained rich, it was much less influential in world history and far less productive of ideas and movements that affected the rest of the world after 1000 than it had been before.