The obvious answer: it connected all of Asia with Eastern Europe and Persia, enabling globalization of culture and goods.
Take a look at the post below, again, and look at that animated GIF that I nabbed off of Wikipedia. The empire was huge. No other empire has ever covered that kind of area in the history of the world.
But just conquering the world would not have led to such a profound effect on these countries, had it not been for the way the Mongols ruled. Unlike Chinese and other governments of the time, the Mongols did not look down on merchants. On the contrary, they liked them, encouraged them, and protected them. The Mongols invented a kind of passport for travelers riding through their lands; it protected their right to be on the trade route. (Interestingly, the passport was written in the Mongol script, which was related to Aramaic.) The Mongols created and protected a unified, continuous, and safe trading network: the old silk routes as well as new avenues (maritime, etc.). The flow of goods was unmatched in world history.
The two hubs in this system, the two areas of privileged positions, were China and Persia. These were the two richest settled regions in the world of that time. Persian and Chinese scholars translated each other's countries' works on medicine, politics, economics, and agriculture. Artistic styles spread. And a very important export of China became so much more beautiful: blue-and-white porcelain.
While true that porcelain production had been going on for some time during the Song, and while true that the cobalt (for the blue color) had been able to be obtained from Baghdad since at least as far back as the Southern Song Dynasty, the Yuan period swiftly developed the art, the craft, and the market of the porcelain wares. The Mongols supported ceramic production at Jingdezhen, where cobalt was never in short supply (due to the stable trade routes). The kilns there were upgraded, and higher temperatures could be reached, which made the porcelain more durable and more sanitary. Arab orders for porcelain affected the pictoral style, the content of the pictures, and the very forms of the ceramics themselves.
Market goods, arts, and scholarly works flowed freely, and so did religion. The Mongols were originally animists, and they were extremely religously tolerant. From the textbook: "Khublai, for instance, welcomed Buddhist, Daoist, Islamic, and Christian clergymen to his court and gave tax exemptions to clerics of all religions" (page 165). On the same page the author goes into the fact that "European popes and kings sent envoys to the Mongol court" and it wasn't just to get them on their side against the Muslims; it was also to find "Christians who had been cut off from the West by the spread of Islam, and in fact there were considerable numbers of Nestorian Christians in Central Asia... there were enough Europeans in Beijing to build a cathedral and appoint a bishop."
So who were the winners in this situation? Merchants, of course. The Mongols allowed mercantilism to rise so much that, as we'll see when we get to Ming China, nothing could stop the economic development, not even Daoism.
Who else won? Islam. The Mongols enabled Islam to stretch all the way into Central Asia, pushing out Buddhism (the previous benefitor of the silk route, all the way back in 300-500 AD) in some areas.
Who else? Europe. Europe was far behind in the 1200s, technologically and scientifically, compared to the East. Europe got gunpowder, printing, and the compass from China and learned astronomy and mathematics from Persia (page 166 of text).
What did China get? Money. And an economic system that would only grow in the next dynasty.
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