ORIGINS

Although historians continue to debate and differ over the perhaps insoluble issue of when the medieval world ended and modern history began, virtually all are agreed that the expansion of European trade beyond the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic—first with Portuguese expansion down the coast of Africa throughout the fifteenth century, and, from 1492, with the initiation of Spanish expansion in the Caribbean, into the American hemisphere—was crucial in the transition from an essentially inward-looking Europe to a truly global economy, albeit one which European powers would continue to dominate until the twentieth century. The dramatic expansion after 1500 of the lines of maritime and commercial communication—with both Spain and Portugal looking, at least in theory in the case of the former and in practice in that of the latter, beyond America and Africa to the fabulous Orient—also extended both the scope for the sources of international conflict to manifest themselves beyond Europe, and, increasingly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for the threats of war between European powers to be located, at least in part, beyond the geographical confines of the Old World. In so far as Portuguese trade with Brazil was concerned, the relatively low-value (in relation to volume) cargoes of dye-woods which began to flow to Europe in increasing quantities by the middle of the sixteenth century attracted few predators. Cargoes of sugar, too, were generally unattractive to intruders. In contrast, cargoes of gold and diamonds, which became of great importance from the late-seventeenth century, were, in principle, much more vulnerable to attack, but the protection usually afforded by the English navy both deterred French intruders and nullified the potential threat from England itself. In the case of Spain, the almost total reliance upon precious metals for return cargoes from America, and the country's inability to secure a permanent rapport in the Hapsburg period with either England or France (and, of course, its long-standing difficulties with the Dutch) combined to ensure that its shipping was under almost constant threat of attack from foreign intruders—official and unofficial— particularly from the middle of the sixteenth century, when France and England began to emerge from a long period of internal instability to challenge Spain for at least the profits of empire, if not the territories which produced them.