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time, foreigners would push their way in and redirect some of this trade, just as had
happened to the Byzantines, but this should not be exaggerated.^9 Right up through
the eighteenth century inter-Ottoman trade was superior in value to foreign trade
(Panzac, 1992: 202–203). Finally, there is something of an ironic twist in saying that
the Ottomans re-created the Byzantine Empire. The irony is that, far from promoting
a strictly Islamic resurgence, the sultans used their strength to benefit indigenous
merchants and mariners across the board. Within the Mediterranean and Black Sea
worlds, Ottoman Christians probably benefitted more than did their Muslim counter-
parts from the departure of the Italians. In a way the Byzantines lived on through
their Ottoman successors.
The Mediterranean in the worldWhen it comes to discussions of the marginalization of the Mediterranean it is impor-
tant to distinguish between two levels of marginalization. The date for one is 1492,
while the date for the other is less definitive but at any rate comes a century later. The
year 1492, of course, refers to Columbus’ arrival in the New World although for our
purposes the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope is just as important (and certainly
registered more quickly in the Mediterranean). Here marginalization refers to the
changing place of the Mediterranean in world trade networks; from being at the very
center throughout the medieval period it moves to a less central position in the early
modern period; just how much less central is, of course, a critical question.
The second level of marginalization is a question of the participants in Mediterranean
trade. Here the best-known paradigm is Braudel’s thesis of a Northern Invasion, by
which he means the entry of northern ships—English, Dutch and, to a certain extent,
French—into the Mediterranean in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Through
ruthless competition they destroyed existing commercial and industrial centers and
became the new masters of the Mediterranean early in the seventeenth century. It is
the Italian states, and above all Venice, that Braudel and others have in mind (Rapp,
1975). Note here that the theme of Italian decline is common to both Ottoman his-
toriography and more world-history treatments of the Mediterranean in this period.
In my discussion in the previous section, and in my writings elsewhere, I have sug-
gested how this purported marginalization of Mediterranean actors looks different
when viewed through an Ottoman lens and I will not dwell on it any more here
(Greene, 2002). Instead I shall confine myself to the place of the Mediterranean in
world trade networks, before moving on to the subject of decline.
We have understood for quite some time now that the revolution ushered in by the
“discovery” of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope took a good
deal longer to come to pass than was previously thought (see also Ruiz, this volume).
At the level of mentalité old ideas and orientations were not so easily displaced. On
the commercial front, the Portuguese may have reached the East Indies at the turn of
the sixteenth century, but another century would pass before the spice trade was
definitively wrenched away from the old routes.
Therefore, at the very earliest, we are speaking of the seventeenth century. Yet even
here the evidence shows how slowly new-world markets grew, compared to the
Mediterranean. In the 1660s nearly half of all English exports from London went to
the Mediterranean, whereas just under 10% were bound for the Americas and the