Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Trade diasporas and cross-cultural trade
- 2 Africa: incentives to trade, patterns of competition
- 3 Africa: traders and trade communities
- 4 Ancient trade
- 5 A new trade axis: the Mediterranean to China, circa 200 B.C. – A.D. 1000
- 6 Asian trade in Eastern seas, 1000–1500
- 7 The European entry into the trade of maritime Asia
- 8 Bugis, banians, and Chinese: Asian traders in the era of the great companies
- 9 Overland trade of the seventeenth century: Armenian carriers between Europe and East Asia
- 10 The North American fur trade
- 11 The twilight of the trade diasporas
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The European entry into the trade of maritime Asia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Trade diasporas and cross-cultural trade
- 2 Africa: incentives to trade, patterns of competition
- 3 Africa: traders and trade communities
- 4 Ancient trade
- 5 A new trade axis: the Mediterranean to China, circa 200 B.C. – A.D. 1000
- 6 Asian trade in Eastern seas, 1000–1500
- 7 The European entry into the trade of maritime Asia
- 8 Bugis, banians, and Chinese: Asian traders in the era of the great companies
- 9 Overland trade of the seventeenth century: Armenian carriers between Europe and East Asia
- 10 The North American fur trade
- 11 The twilight of the trade diasporas
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
European voyages around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic brought revolutionary changes in world history, but the full consequences were slow to appear. European shipping, like other European technology, had developed remarkably during the Middle Ages, but it was not yet vastly superior to Asian shipping. It was not yet what it was to become when industrial power made Europe the unquestioned world leader. Europeans of the sixteenth century were much stronger than they had been in military and naval power, but they were not dominant.
The European “maritime revolution” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not so much a revolution in ship design as the discovery of the world wind system. Prevailing winds vary with latitude in the Atlantic, Pacific, and the southern Indian Ocean. Strong and regular trade winds blow from the east over about twenty degrees north and south of the equator – from the northeast north of the line, from the southeast south of the line. Still farther north or south, from about forty to sixty degrees north or south, the prevailing winds are from the west. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Portuguese mariners had discovered this pattern off the Saharan coast of Africa. They learned to sail south with the northeast trades and then, on the return, to make a long tack to the north-northwest sailing as close as they could to the prevailing northeasterly winds. In time, this would bring them to the westerlies in the vicinity of the Azores. Columbus had sailed down the African coast before he considered crossing the Atlantic.
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- Cross-Cultural Trade in World History , pp. 136 - 157Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1984