It is not easy for historians of the present age to take a backward glance at the period before 1800 and recreate its images. For European historians especially organic links with that distant past are so far lost that the social landmarks of even the late eighteenth century are scarcely recognisable in terms of living experience. To suggest that the year 1750 might constitute a symbolical meridian in time is to invite an insistent question. What kind of life-cycle for human civilisation in general came to an end around that period? Was it perhaps feudalism; or is the statement just another instance of empty rhetoric imitative of the Gallic tradition and able to offer nothing more than a vague generalisation? As the question echoes back, the reasoning behind the original comment in the opening page of chapter 1 gradually re-emerges. The great sailing vessels which in our period of study were to be found in every port of the western Indian Ocean, from Basra to Cambay and from Calicut to Mombassa, can still be seen in Bombay harbour alongside the modern freighter and tanker. No European East-Indiaman, however, sails today through the Bay of Biscay to the island of Madeira to take on board fifty-odd casks of malmsey and then cross the line, as contemporary logs describe the Equator, to make landfall at the palm-fringed sea-front of Cochin or Calicut.