A

ASIA

ASIA. Three centuries separate the missions of Vasco da Gama to India in 1498 and George Macartney to China in 1793. Da Gama opened a new sea route to the Orient; Lord Macartney, ambassador of Great Britain, sought to renegotiate the terms of trade with the Qing (Manchu) empire. During the course of the intervening centuries, successive waves of Europeans sailed into Asia—after the Portuguese came the Dutch, English, Spanish, and French. Their experiences taught them that there was more than one Asia. In south and east Asia, there were the powerful and expansive continental empires of the Mughals and the Manchus. In northeast Asia, there were the secluded kingdoms of Korea and Japan. But initially, for the Europeans, there was above all the Asia of the Indian Ocean trading network.

EUROPE ENTERS THE ASIAN TRADE NETWORK

The Indian Ocean network consisted of three inter-locking circuits—the Arabian Seas, the Bay of Bengal, and Indonesia–east Asia. It was in this Asia that European merchantmen established small but permanent bases stretching around the entire Indian Ocean littoral, from the port of Mombasa in the west to Nagasaki in the east. From those bases, Europeans pressed for monopoly control over the spices, silks, porcelain, and other products that crossed the Indian Ocean's trading network. Until 1850, European ambitions in Asia raced ahead of their limited resource bases. Before the industrial revolution and the European drive for expansion, European states lacked both the financial means and the military power to effect any grand design in Asia.

As the first to arrive in Asian waters via the sea route around Africa, the Portuguese established a trading empire in the Arabian Seas circuit and maintained partial control over it for most of the sixteenth century. A century later the Dutch constructed the first colonial empire in Asia and revolutionized almost every dimension of the Indian Ocean trading system—from how it was organized to how business was transacted. The English East India Company arrived on the scene contemporaneously with the Dutch but did not become a major force in Asian trade until after the latter went into decline, between 1680 and 1720. Over the course of the remainder of the eighteenth century, the English developed a passion for empire, first in India and then in China. After 1720 they pushed first the Dutch and subsequently the late-arriving French East India Company aside and established themselves as the dominant European trader in Asian waters. Concurrently, they commenced building an empire on the subcontinent of Asia, and in 1793, with the Macartney mission to China, inaugurated a clash between the expanding empires of England and Qing China in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Two facets of the early modern history of European empire building in the Indian Ocean deserve to be emphasized. First is the intra-Asian or "country trade," to call it by its eighteenth-century name. From the Asian perspective, the emergence of three great Muslim empires (Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal) by the sixteenth century and the unprecedented growth of the Kiangnan region in the lower Yangtze valley of the Ming-Qing empire greatly stimulated the expansion of the intra-Asian regional trade, and with it, a nascent consumer culture in Asia. From the European perspective, it was Europe's good fortune to arrive at the moment the Asian system was undergoing a period of unprecedented growth. Once the Europeans learned how the system operated and the role Asian merchants played in it, they sought out partnerships with those merchants. For their part, the European traders contributed to the further expansion of the system by linking the "country trade" to the long-distance Atlantic trade routes that carried Asian products to Europe's own emergent consumer culture. Thus, over time, these partnerships, such as those between Portuguese and Gujarati merchants or between Dutch and Chinese traders, became one of the central features of the system. The English, too, were attuned to the importance of such partnerships and made a series of them during their eighteenth-century rise to dominance. It is worth repeating that Asian-European partnerships were a key feature of the Indian Ocean trading system and played an important role in its continued growth. From a world-historical perspective, some historians identify this as the "age of partnership" and interpret it as part of the deeper integration and globalization of trade linked to an emergent consumer culture in both East and West.

Alongside the intra-Asian trade, European initiatives came to be central to early modern European empire building in Asia. The collective effect of these initiatives transformed the Asian system of trade. These initiatives came in two chronological waves, the first in the sixteenth century and the second in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The first wave was primarily Portuguese in origin and included the opening of the Atlantic sea route around Africa to the Orient and the linkage of the intra-Asian regional trade routes to the Atlantic route; the introduction of the large ships called armed merchantmen; and the emergence of cultural intermediaries, the first of whom were Jesuit missionaries. In later centuries, sea voyagers and official embassies from various European countries greatly expanded the fund of European knowledge about Asia.

The Dutch and English sponsored the second wave of initiatives. These initiatives were truly revolutionary in terms of their impact on the Indian Ocean trading networks. Over a two-century period (1600–1800) they fundamentally transformed the Asian trading system. The two most important of these second-wave initiatives were the transplantation of a novel form of business organization (the joint stock company) into Asia and the fusion of private merchant interests and state policy. Ranking close behind these two initiatives in significance were the systematization of the intra-Asian carrying trade and its transference to European control after 1700; the shift of the center of trade from the west coast of India (the Arabian Seas circuit) to the Bay of Bengal and Indonesian circuits; and the altered composition of the trade, from spices and porcelains to "drug foods" (such as sugar, coffee, tea, and opium) and cotton textiles.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the combined effects of these initiatives were transforming not just Euro-Asian relations but also the world economy. Regarding the former, partnerships more and more resembled patron-client relationships, and Asians west of Guangzhou (Canton) were the clients. Regarding the European initiatives, by about 1750 they had begun to shift the center of gravity of the world economy away from the shores of the Indian Ocean to those of Atlantic Europe. In other words, the important economic decisions were more often made in Amsterdam and London rather than in Surat or Melaka or Guangzhou. Nonetheless, this shift was incremental. Although still incomplete by the time Lord Macartney undertook his mission to China in 1793, it eventually culminated in an armed confrontation between the expanding British and Qing empires over trade and sovereignty.

THE PORTUGUESE, THE DUTCH, AND THE SPICE TRADE

In 1498, all of this, of course, lay in the future. Neither Vasco da Gama nor his immediate successors, especially Afonso de Albuquerque (1453–1515), the chief architect of the Portuguese empire in Asia, entertained the slightest notion of creating partnerships with Asian merchants. Their intent was to establish trade monopolies and redirect the spice trade away from the Levantine caravan routes, with their links to the Arabian Seas circuit. Between 1500 and 1515, from their base at Goa, the Portuguese used their superior naval forces to effect a significant measure of control over most of this circuit, which included the Malabar Coast of western India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the related caravan routes of Persia and the Tigris-Euphrates valley. During that brief period, they identified and then captured control of many of the major choke points of the Indian Ocean, such as strategically located entrepôts of Hormuz at the entrance of the Persian Gulf and Melaka on the Straits of Melaka. The latter controlled the trade of the Far Eastern circuit of the Indian Ocean. However, the Portuguese failed to capture Aden, located at the entrance of the Red Sea. That failure meant that the Levantine trade routes via the Red Sea remained open, and Portugal could not and did not establish a complete monopoly over the spice trade.

The Estado da India nonetheless remitted handsome profits from the pepper trade back to Lisbon for most of the sixteenth century. Estado officials and private Portuguese traders realized that even greater profits could be made through partnerships with Asian merchants. Together they continued to expand the trade of the Indian Ocean, linked some of its commerce to the new sea route around Africa, and grew wealthy servicing the expanding intra-Asian trade with silver, tin, copper, spices, and horses. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Portuguese had also become involved in the lucrative trade of the Far Eastern circuit. In fact, between about 1550 and 1637, Portuguese merchantmen had linked together all three trading circuits of the Indian Ocean, moving a variety of goods between its major entrepôts.

In 1637, a seemingly minor event in Japan—the decision of the military government to expel the Portuguese for meddling in Japanese politics—set in motion a series of events that undermined the Portuguese in east Asian waters, opened the way for Dutch competitors to displace them, and all but eliminated Japanese participation in intra-Asian trade until the 1860s. In any case, the Portuguese crown had received little if any of the profits from the intra-Asian trade; they primarily flowed into the pockets of corrupt Estado officials and private Portuguese merchants and their Asian partners. Thus, within a half-century of the Portuguese seizure of Goa and Melaka, Asians had assimilated most Portuguese into their social world, or, in the case of the Japanese, had expelled them. By about 1600 Asia was looking very much as it had before the Portuguese arrival in 1498.

In Europe, in spite or more likely because of the Wars of Religion, the Dutch seized the opportunity to enter the Asian market. With their powerful market economy, the Dutch were well positioned to enter the arena of long-distance trading. They possessed an astonishingly rich resource base and a working knowledge of Asian waters. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten provided the latter. In 1594, he returned to Holland after serving the Portuguese for ten years, six of them in Goa. Using van Linschoten's maps, sailing directions, and detailed information about the spice trade, separate groups of Dutch merchants posted sixty-five ships to Asian waters between 1595 and 1602. As anticipated, the ships returned with cargoes of fine spices—mace, cloves, and nutmeg—that earned their sponsors handsome profits.

These unplanned ventures came at a cost, a marketplace glutted with spices. In order to remedy this situation, several groups of Dutch merchants agreed to pool their resources to create a unique commercial organization, the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC, founded in 1602). Its initial capitalization was an astounding 6.5 million guldens. What made the VOC unique was the separation of investors from the company's professional managers. In the early years of this experiment in business organization, the VOC usually paid between 25 and 30 percent dividends on shares in the company. The Dutch creation would soon be known as a "joint stock" company, a revolutionary business structure that had revolutionary consequences for Asian trade.

THE DUTCH EMPIRE IN INDONESIA

Among the most successful of the first generation of VOC managers were Governors-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen (served 1617–1629) and his able successor Anthony van Diemen (served 1636–1645). Over the course of the seventeenth century, they and their successors fundamentally restructured the Indian Ocean trading network.

When Coen arrived in Asian waters, he discovered that the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) were not only a source of wealth but also stood at the crossroads of trade between India, China, and Japan. He decided that the center of trade had to be moved from the Arabian Seas circuit to the Indonesia–east Asia circuit. This meant abandoning the idea of a trading empire in favor of the establishment of an overseas capital, strategically located in Indonesia. From Indonesia he could deploy superior Dutch naval power, westward toward the Coromandel coast of India and the Bay of Bengal and eastward toward Japan and China. The navy would also be used to maintain control of the Spice Islands themselves.

As a first step, in 1619, Governor-General Coen seized the Javanese port of Jakarta and renamed it Batavia, the Roman name of Holland; it became the "major naval base, shipbuilding center, and entrepôt for the Dutch East India Company" (Ringrose, p. 158). Coen found local allies in the large Chinese community of Batavia. His two chief Chinese collaborators were Su Minggang, a godfather figure in the Chinese community, and his chief aide Jan Con, whose primary function was to recruit laborers from the southeastern coastal province of Fujian. Su and Jan also advised Coen and van Diemen on market conditions in the two eastern circuits of the Indian Ocean and, on their own initiative, developed the hinterland of Batavia. The Chinese established sugar plantations and harvested the timber resources of Java. In both cases, they used the labor of Fujianese coolies. Coen's collaboration with the Chinese points to an important reality about Batavia, that it was from the outset both a Dutch and a Chinese town. With the passage of time, the Chinese community became more and more robust at the expense of the Dutch. Finally, in the mid-eighteenth century, the Dutch turned on the Chinese residents (their former collaborators), massacring ten thousand of them and looting their homes and businesses.

Shocking as this massacre may seem, the Dutch had long before acquired a reputation for cruelty in their empire building. In fact, the systematic use of naval power was a basic tactic in Coen's strategy to create a "ring of force" around the Moluccas and the other Spice Islands (Fernandez-Armesto, p. 326). In pursuit of that goal, the Dutch used maximum force on a number of occasions. For example, in 1621 Dutch forces either killed or deported as slaves the entire population of the island of Banda. When the Ceramese rebelled against Dutch policy and killed 160 Dutch in 1651, the Dutch in retaliation forcibly resettled twelve thousand Ceramese from Ceram Island to Amboina and Manipa.

The Dutch completed their ring of force around the Spice Islands in 1669, when they reduced Makassar (Ujung Pandang), the most powerful of the Indonesian states, to a colony. The defeat of Makassar gave the Dutch a world monopoly over the production of spices. Only Bantam maintained a semblance of independence from the Dutch, but by 1682 it, too, had become a VOC colony. The isolated and fragmented island polities of Indonesia were simply no match for the powerful Dutch navy and the VOC's single-minded drive to control spice production.

Was the spice monopoly worth the price? Most historians would agree that an Asian market for spices remained very active throughout this period, while European spice consumption was declining. Only the growing mid-eighteenth-century popularity of cinnamon from Ceylon increased the total VOC revenue from spices. Still, the question persists, and it may well be that the VOC's spice monopoly was not profitable in the long run. First, it limited the ability of the VOC to maneuver in a changing world market. Although spices were a safe source of profit, they had little potential for growth, at least in Europe. Meanwhile, a consumer culture had emerged in Europe and Asia that was demanding such goods as textiles, tea, and coffee. The VOC seemed incapable of responding to these new demands, because its labyrinthine bureaucratic structure was tied to the flow of spices. The VOC's chief rival, the English East India Company (EEIC), founded in 1600, had already decided that these new commodities had a much larger potential market than spices. Furthermore, the cost of maintaining a naval force large enough to enforce the VOC's monopoly was enormous. In other words, the cost of empire may ultimately have exceeded its profits. The Dutch were able to reduce the gap between cost and profit only by introducing the cultivation of coffee in the eighteenth century.

Creating a ring of force around the fine spices in Indonesia was but one aspect of the Dutch presence in Asia. Indeed, the largest part of seventeenth-century VOC activity was in the "country trade" of the Indian Ocean. In the 1630s and 1640s the company derived its largest profits from its monopoly over the sale of spices within Asia and its transportation of Japanese silver to China. More importantly, in carving out a major role for the VOC in the "country trade," the Dutch fundamentally altered the intraregional trading system. The revolutionary organizational structure of the VOC allowed the Dutch to systematize the intra-Asian carrying trade in a way never before possible, and, in the process, displace Asian merchants. By 1700, VOC managers through the organizational efficiencies of their company were transforming once-independent Asian merchants into their clients. The decline of the Asian merchants' status continued into the eighteenth century as the Dutch (and later the English) came to control more and more of the country trade through their joint stock companies.

THE RISE OF THE ENGLISH IN ASIA

The decline of the VOC relative to its European competitors, primarily the EEIC, can be placed somewhere between 1680 and 1720. It has been attributed to three factors: excessive dividends; the high cost of maintaining the spice monopoly; and the inflexibility of VOC, which rendered it unable to respond to the demands of new consumer cultures of Europe and Asia. Although the VOC remained a viable economic force in Asia throughout the eighteenth century, the EEIC was also slowly displacing it as the dominant European trader in Asia.

In 1600, no one could have predicted that England would become Europe's most successful empire builder in Asia. The earlier achievements of the Portuguese and Dutch and those of the late-arriving French pale in comparison with English successes of the eighteenth century. In a matter of a half-century, from about 1750 to about 1800, the English had become masters of most of the Indian subcontinent, and in 1793 they were prepared to push farther east and challenge the mighty Qing empire for sovereignty and power in east Asia.

What historical pushes and pulls transformed the English East India Company from its seventeenth-century status as beggar at the court of the great Mughal emperors to that of masters of a British India in the eighteenth century? In 1600, the English did indeed beg the Mughals of India for a farman, an imperial directive that would grant England regular trading privileges throughout the Mughal empire and, with it, access to the markets of south Asia. In 1608 Captain William Hawkins (c. 1560–1613), the first of the English East India Company's envoys, received permission for the company to trade at Surat, but the Mughal emperor offered no farman encompassing the whole empire. Other envoys followed, Sir Thomas Roe in 1618 and William Hedges in 1682. The latter's mission is particularly revealing of the EEIC's status in late-seventeenth-century Mughal India.

EEIC officials in Bengal and the company's governor in London, Sir Josiah Child, interfered with Hughes's mission, causing Emperor Aurangzeb (‘Ālamgir; ruled 1658–1707) to break off the negotiations. Challenged, or, perhaps embarrassed, Child decided on war with the Mughals. "Child's War," 1686–1690, ended in disaster for the English. In 1689 the Mughal fleet commanded by the African Sidi Yakub took Bombay, which had been an English entrepôt since 1668. After a year of resistance, the English surrendered, and in 1690 the company sent envoys to Aurangzeb's camp to plead for a pardon. The company's envoys had to prostrate themselves before the emperor, pay an enormous indemnity, and promise better behavior in the future. The emperor withdrew his troops and the company subsequently reestablished itself in Bombay and set up a new base in Calcutta.

The 1690s were the start of a period of economic expansion for the EEIC in Asia. Only Bombay on the subcontinent's west coast did not share in the general expansion of the company's other major entrepôts, Madras and Calcutta, on the east coast. Bombay's trade suffered because the Marathan admiral Kanhoji Angria targeted its shipping, and until the 1730s, the advantage lay with Kanhoji. Meanwhile, Madras and Calcutta prospered as the volume of trade grew exponentially in such items as cotton textiles, silks, molasses, and saltpeter. Although the tea trade had its origins back in the 1660s, it was not until the turn of the century that it began to take hold as the preferred beverage among English of all social strata; the boom in tea profits had to wait until the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, American silver paid for the bulk of English imports, including tea. London critics denounced the outflow of bullion for Asian goods, but handsome dividends had a way of silencing mercantilist rhetoric.

Beginning in the 1690s and reaching into the 1750s, the EEIC started shedding its beggar status and laying claim to a loftier standing within the Asian trading world. Neither the EEIC nor its ally, the English government, had decided on a course of empire building in Asia. Rather, the convergence of a number of historical developments in the mid-eighteenth century not only made empire building possible but also invited it. First, the EEIC encouraged its servants and free traders to pursue trade aggressively within the intra-Asian trading system. This policy allowed men like the country trader Thomas Pitt, who later became governor of Madras, to earn vast fortunes. A second development was the company's merger with the many private syndicates operating in Asian waters. These syndicates, called "interlopers," had regularly disregarded the EEIC's legal monopoly over Asian trade. The merger resulted in the heavy recapitalization of the EEIC (at about 3.2 million pounds) and its renaming in 1708 as the United East India Company. Third, concurrent with the merger with the "interloper" syndicates was the systematization of the company's bureaucracy. Its streamlined organization gave it a competitive edge over the VOC and Indian-operated shipping. The effects of this combination—heavy English investment and an efficiently functioning bureaucracy—were almost immediately visible. English shipping interests pushed the Dutch aside and greatly reduced Indian participation in the intra-Asian trade of the Indian Ocean. Fourth, the early successes of the EEIC depended upon alliances with Indian merchants, like the house of Jagat Seth. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Indian partners had already begun the long slide into dependency on the company. Such dependencies would become a feature of English-Indian relations after 1750, as partnerships gave way to client status for Indian merchants. In this regard, the eighteenth-century English experience in Asia paralleled to a great extent that of the Dutch in Indonesia.

The English East India Company's continued fortunes in south Asia ultimately turned on its ability to obtain an empire-wide farman from the now declining Mughal overlords of India. After another English ambassador in 1701 had failed to obtain the elusive guarantee, a new mission to Delhi headed by John Surman threatened to withdraw the company's factors from Surat and its other establishments in Gujarat unless it was granted. Because the company's economic stake in this western region of India generated a significant amount of revenue for the Mughals, the emperor, Farrukhsiyar, relented. He granted a farman on 31 December 1716, little realizing the far-reaching consequences of his action. EEIC officials now resembled other imperial officeholders of the Mughal empire. More importantly, under the terms of the directive, the EEIC could take action against anyone infringing on its rights. It was this aspect of the farman that opened the way for future intervention in the political affairs of India, and intervention over the course of the eighteenth century eventually led to the incorporation of India into a British empire.

Was English intervention after 1716 a result of an alliance struck between the company and wealthy and powerful Indian merchants, such as the house of Jagat Seth? Was the company drawn into Indian politics in order to safeguard its own growing economic, political, and territorial investments? Was conquest the result of the transplantation of eighteenth-century Anglo-French rivalries into Asian waters, a rivalry that carried over into Indian politics? These are some of the questions historians are presently debating regarding the British conquest of India. The debate continues; the best that can be offered here is a brief account of the stages of the conquest, with an eye toward Macartney's 1793 mission to China.

Eighteenth-century English expansion into India falls into three periods. The first was a period in which the company agents and private traders found their way into "a lively market in commercial, fiscal and military opportunities" (Keay, p. 377). This was the "market opportunities" stage, 1716–1748. "Colonial imperialism" made its appearance in the 1740s. Beginning in that decade, the English and French engaged in a series of wars for empire. In India, the most famous protagonists of these conflicts were Joseph-François Dupleix and Charles de Bussy-Castelnau on the French side and Robert Clive and Charles Watson on the English side. Victory ultimately came to the English in the 1760s because of three factors: the decisive leadership of men like Clive, Watson, and William Pitt, the architect of victory in the Seven Years' War (1756–1763); the superior ability of the English to pay for Indian allies and Indian troops (called sepoys); and finally an appetite for empire, which had begun to emerge during the course of the Seven Years' War in India. Certainly Robert Clive was its first proponent, and almost all of his late-eighteenth-century successors, especially Richard Wellesley, shared Pitt's and Clive's imperial ambitions.

The period between 1764 and the end of the century marked the true beginnings of British dominion in India. The French had been defeated. However, before the English could truly lay claim to the title of raj, they had to overcome stiff Indian resistance. In addition to the Four Mysore wars (1767–1804), the three Maratha wars (1780–1803), and the two Sikh wars (c. 1840–1856), there were a host of lesser battles fought and won. The English may not have had a plan of conquest for India, but this succession of wars strongly suggests that their appetite for empire grew with the eating of the Indian pudding. Seen from this perspective, the mission of Macartney to China was but a further extension of England's expanding Asian empire.

Before the Macartney mission, English East Indiamen had been trading on the South China coast since the second decade of the eighteenth century. What had attracted them was tea, a product for which there was an expanding consumer market in the Atlantic world. By the 1780s, Western demand had grown to a point where it was causing balance of payment problems for English merchantmen. As mercantilists they parted reluctantly with their silver, but that was precisely what the Chinese demanded for their tea. Secondly, English traders chafed under Qing empire–imposed restrictions requiring that all commerce must be conducted at the port of Canton (Guangzhou) and through designated Chinese merchants. It was in hopes of ending these trade restrictions and opening markets for English manufactured products as a way to solve the balance of payments problem that the British government dispatched Macartney to China in 1793.

ASIA IN THE EUROPEAN IMAGINATION

By the time Ambassador Macartney sailed for China, Eurocentrically imagined Asians had become familiar figures on the European scene. During the nearly three centuries since Vasco da Gama had made landfall on the Malabar coast, a large body of literature about Asia and Asians had accumulated. Contributors included Jesuit missionaries, land and sea voyagers, official embassies, fictional writers, and "Asianist" scholars of several varieties, none of whom had ever visited any part of Asia, but who still wrote "knowingly" about it. From the fifteenth-century beginnings of Europe's contacts with Asia, Asia became whatever suited the needs of the Western imagination. More importantly, the Western perspective on Asia shifted over time. The shift occurred very late in the early modern period, around the 1770s. Until then an idealized Asia prevailed. At some indeterminate moment in the late seventeenth century China came to represent this idealized Asia. Asia (read China) was a land of wisdom, moral philosophy, and good government by a cultured elite. China was everything Europe should be. The idealization culminated in the eighteenth-century China vogue known as chinoiserie. In France, it expressed itself in a cult of Confucius, and in England it influenced everything from art to architecture to garden designs.

Suddenly, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, this particular Eurocentrically idealized imagine of Asia came crashing down. Those who brought it down were men of the high Enlightenment, the Daniel Defoes, Horace Walpoles, Montesquieus, and Voltaires. Aided by a new "scientific" approach to history, the philosophes discovered that Asia (read China) was backward, despotic, and intellectually stagnant, and that Asians were physically inferior. From the vantage point of this new perspective, Europeans believed that they had little to learn from Asians, but that Asians had much to learn from progressive, modern Europeans. It was this perspective that Macartney took with him when he met the Qing emperor in 1793. It has been this perspective that has informed much of the writings about Europe's contact with Asia since then. It was only in the last twenty years or so of the twentieth century that a rising generation of historians has sought to revise this Eurocentrically imagined perspective of Asia and reimagine Eurasia in a global setting.

See also British Colonies: India; Cartography and Geography; Colonialism; Dutch Colonies: The East Indies; Europe and the World; Exploration; French Colonies: India; Gama, Vasco da; Goa; Portuguese Colonies: The Indian Ocean and Asia; Trading Companies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barendse, R. J. "Trade and State in the Arabian Seas: A Survey from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century." Journal of World History 11, no. 2 (2000): 173–225.

Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce. Translated by Siân Reynolds. New York, 1982.

Chaudhuri, K. N. Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1990.

——. Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1985.

Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Millennium. New York and London, 1995.

Hevia, James L. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793. Durham, N.C., 1995.

Keay, John. India: A History. London, 2000.

Linton, Derek S. "Asia and the West in the New World Economy—The Limited Thalassocracies: The Portuguese and the Dutch in Asia, 1498–1700." In Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching. Edited by Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck. Armonk, N.Y., 1997.

——. "Asia and the West in the New World Order—From Trading Companies to Free Trade Imperialism: The British and their Rivals in Asia, 1700–1850." In Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching. Edited by Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck. Armonk, N.Y., 1997.

Mungello, D. E. The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800. Lanham, Md., 1999.

Parry, J. H. The Establishment of the European Hegemony: 1415–1715: Trade and Exploration in the Age of the Renaissance. New York, 1966.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, 2000.

Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik. The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. Armonk, N.Y., 1999.

Reid, Anthony. Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia. Singapore, 2000.

Ringrose, David R. Expansion and Global Interaction, 1200–1700. New York, 2000.

Robb, Peter. A History of India. Basingstoke, U.K., 2002.

SarDesai, D. R. Southeast Asia Past and Present. 4th ed. Boulder, Colo., 1997.

Spence, Jonathan D. The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds. New York, 1998.

Thompson, William R. "The Military Superiority Thesis and the Ascendancy of Western Eurasia in the World System." Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (1999): 143–178.

CHARLES LILLEY