This book explains how and why and how destructive continental influences destroyed Asia’s maritime supremacy.

Following the series’ first book How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World, this book continues to demonstrate how maritime trade has been the key driver of the world’s wealth-creation, economic and intellectual progress.

The story begins where the first book ends, when following Roman Empire collapse, 7th-century European maritime trade almost ceased, creating population collapse and poverty; the Dark Ages. In 700, stuttering, hesitant recovery was evident with new ports but Viking and Muslim maritime raiding neutered recovery until the 11th century. In Asia by contrast, short and long-haul trade thrived and accelerated from east Africa and the Persian Gulf all the way to China, encouraging Southeast Asian state formation.

The book tells the story of slowly rising, gradually accelerating European maritime trade, which until the 15th century was overshadowed by far more voluminous Asian trade in much larger, more complex ships traded by more sophisticated commercial entities, contributing to innovative tolerant wealth-creating maritime societies. In Europe, Mediterranean maritime trade made most progress from about 1000 to 1450. But by 1700, north Europeans dominated Atlantic, American and Mediterranean trade and were penetrating sophisticated Asian maritime networks, a complete reversal.

This book explains how and why and how destructive continental influences destroyed Asia’s maritime supremacy. As in the first book, Nick Collins finds similar patterns; maritime inquisitiveness, invention, problem-solving and toleration and continental political suppression of those maritime traits, most dramatically in China, but destructively everywhere, allowing the millennium maritime trade revolution.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Themes
• Part I: Vibrant Indian Ocean and Dark Age Europe Trade
  • Chapter 1 China’s T’ang Dynasty and the Rise of Srivijaya
  • Chapter 2 Baghdad, Persian Gulf and Omani Trade with East Africa and India
  • Chapter 3 Frisian, English and Scandinavian Trade
  • Chapter 4 The Muslim Mediterranean and Byzantine-Rus Black Sea 35
  • Chapter 5 Italian Ports
  • Chapter 6 Consequences of Indian Ocean Trade Acceleration
  • Chapter 7 Europe’s Eleventh Century
• Part II: Asia’s Trade Accelerates: Europe’s Trade Progresses
  • Chapter 8 The Western Indian Ocean
  • Chapter 9 Europe’s Twelfth Century
  • Chapter 10 Europe’s Thirteenth Century
  • Chapter 11 Accelerating Song Maritime Trade Boom
  • Chapter 12 Effects of Song and Yuan Maritime Trade on Indian Ocean Trade
  • Chapter 13 Crusades, Blame Games and the Mongols’ Maritime Significance
  • Chapter 14 Perspective and Reflection. Asia-Europe Maritime Trade to the Mid-14th Century
• Part III: Asia’s Own Goals: Europe’s Catch-Up
  • Chapter 15 The Ming Revolution and its Maritime Consequences
  • Chapter 16 The Needham Question
  • Chapter 17 Mediterranean and Black Sea: Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
  • Chapter 18 Atlantic Europe: Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
  • Chapter 19 The Indian Ocean and China Sea After Zheng He and Before the Portuguese
  • Chapter 20 Portugal’s Ambition
• Part IV: Connecting Worlds: Fifteenth To Mid-Seventeenth Century
  • Chapter 21 A Portuguese Maritime ‘Empire’?
  • Chapter 22 The Netherlands, England and the Baltic
  • Chapter 23 Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean Setbacks
  • Chapter 24 The World Market: French, English and Dutch
  • Chapter 25 English and Dutch Entry into the Mediterranean
  • Chapter 26 The New World: Castile’s and Spanish American Trade Perspectives
  • Chapter 27 Dutch Ascent v Stuart Neglect: Europe and the Americas
  • Chapter 28 Dutch Ascent v Stuart Neglect: EIC v VOC
  • Chapter 29 Anglo-Dutch Intellectual, Scientific and Cultural Advances and Exchanges
  • Chapter 30 “All the wars carried on in Europe have been mixed up together and become one”
• Part V: Maritime Trade To Centre Stage: An Emerging Modern World
  • Chapter 31 The Peace of Westphalia
  • Chapter 32 The English Commonwealth and the Dutch Republic
  • Chapter 33 Ming, Manchu and the Last Asian Maritime Power
  • Chapter 34 European Competition: The 1660s and 1670s
  • Chapter 35 European Competition: The 1680s and 1690s
  • Chapter 36 Second-half 17th Century European Maritime Trade, Culture, Philosophy and Science
  • Chapter 37 Changing Baltic Trade Patterns
  • Chapter 38 Mercantilism?
  • Chapter 39 End-Millennium Perspective
  • Chapter 40 American Maritime Commerce before Columbus
• Glossary
• Notes
• Select Bibliography