104 Chapter Threeresponded sensitively to new economic opportunities. Each voyage
was a new proposition, requiring new decisions by everyone con
cerned. Investors who subscribed to successive voyages had frequent
opportunities to shy away from unprofitable undertakings and could
redeploy their resources anytime they saw a better chance to reap a
profit.
As long as European overseas enterprises were managed in this
fashion, armed force on the seas was made to pay for itself by a
relatively close conformity to the dictates of the capital market. Effort
and energy expended by individual captains and their crews acted like
the molecules of an expanding gas, probing everywhere the limits of
profitable transactions. And whenever a captain returned with un
usually handsome profits, other ships soon followed.
For this reason, the Portuguese intrusion into the Indian Ocean in
1497 was not an evanescent epiphenomenon of world history, as the
much larger Chinese naval expeditions to the same waters earlier in
the century had turned out to be. Instead, an unceasing succession of
European ships visited Asian shores, seizing whatever opportunities
for trade and plunder came their way.
As European ships gradually became more numerous, their capacity
to affect Asian economic and political life increased until, eventually,
even the greatest land empires of Asia were unable to resist European
power. This extraordinary shift took three centuries to reach its
climax, by which time the Europeans’ mix of market and military
enterprise had undergone considerable modification. But until the
nineteenth century, sea trade and privateering remained intimately
connected; and even after the development of regular navies in the
second half of the seventeenth century, prize money awarded for the
capture of enemy vessels remained an important part of the income
naval officers and crews could look forward to.
On land, the mingling of mercenary and military motives never
worked as smoothly as on the sea. Noblemen, disdainful of pecuniary
calculations in principle if not always in practice, played the leading
role in European armies. Their ideals of prowess and personal honor
were fundamentally incompatible with the financial, logistical, and
routine administrative aspects of military management. On the sea,
prowess was firmly subordinated to finance because before a ship
sailed it had to be fitted out with a rather complicated assortment of
supplies which could only be gathered together by payments of
money. On land, the expenses armies incurred were no less real, but
supply was not crisply divided into the costs of equipping separate