To turn to a general historical study of past civilisations after sixteen years of documentary and archival research is not an easy decision. The completion of my work on the English East India Company in the summer of 1975 left me with considerable uncertainty about the future direction in which I should go. A huge amount of material which I had collected still awaited further investigation and analysis, especially on the social aspects of the early European presence in Asia. At the same time, the urge to escape for a while from the rigours of a long scholastic incarceration was very strong. Several factors encouraged me to move in the direction of the present study. In the spring of 1975 I met Fernand Braudel for the first time in Prato, during the Settima Settimana di Studi at the Francesco Datini Institute, of which he is the President. Braudel and his wife received me with kindness and expressed an interest in seeing my current research, still unpublished at that time. He himself was then working on the last two volumes of Civilisation matérielle with the active support of his wife, and it was evident that a vast historical canvas, a work of great inspiration, was slowly taking shape. The sessions of the Datini Institute that year were devoted to world monetary history from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth.