impact on Indian Ocean commerce but never achieved a monopoly, and
while Europeans did come from time to time to control markets in certain
commodities, they never came close to dominating Indian Ocean trade before
the eighteenth century.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the total trade of the
Indian Ocean increased for everyone involved, Portuguese and Asians alike.
India and China still led the world in manufacturing and in volume of
exchange even though much of Chinese external trade was stifled or had to
come from smuggling. This was a period of particular strength for Indian
trade; the Indians dominated the textile business, for example, more com-
pletely than the Portuguese dominated any trade. When the Portuguese
became too greedy and interfered too much with the trade of others, those
people simply readjusted and redeployed, bypassing whatever problem the
Portuguese were causing. As a result the old spice route up the Red Sea to
Egypt did not collapse in the sixteenth century but rather prospered. The
Portuguese, in fact, had ambitions beyond their capacities. Their successors,
the Dutch and English, had considerably more capacity and proved to be
more efficient and relentless. In the seventeenth century they came much
closer to imposing monopolies over their own parts of the trade, and in the
following century the great age of Indian shipping ended with a resounding
thud. This heralded much larger changes for the world of the eighteenth
century in manufacturing, where Europe challenged and then quickly
surpassed Asia.
Indeed, thefinal passing of the premodern world concluded in the eight-
eenth century with the advent of industrialization. Whether the modern
capitalist system, which sets everything that came before it apart from
everything that came after it, can be traced to around the sixteenth century,
as one school of scholars maintains, or can be seen as having been in the
process of development since the fourth millenniumBCE, as their opponents
claim, no one can deny the transformative role of the industrial revolution. It
represents the second step, the final maturation of the world system, by
inaugurating a new kind of economy and concomitantly an essentially dif-
ferent kind of society. The mechanization of production and the harnessing
of science and technology unleashed hitherto unimaginable forces for the
production of goods. This was accompanied by a quantum shift in the scale
of distribution, exchange, and consumption and thefinal triumph of price-
setting markets and techniques of cost efficiency. Mercantile elites assumed
control within their states, and commercial states soon marginalized their
more traditional (and less“modernized”) rivals. What has been called the
“historical center of gravity” shifted away from its ancient cores. In the
nineteenth century sails passed to steam and carts gave way to railroads. All
older systems, world, regional, or otherwise, were subsumed as networks
merged into a truly global system. That time and place we know as the
modern world hadfinally arrived.
142 Epilogue