The Eighteenth-Century State System^389

The trading post established by the British East India Company in Surat, India,

late eighteenth century.

Brazil, which belonged to Portugal. The Dutch had bases on the northern

coast of South America, West Africa, South Africa (their colony at the Cape

of Good Hope was the only permanent European settlement at the time in

South Africa), the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the Indian sub­

continent, and Southeast Asia, where they conquered three Islamic states in

the late seventeenth century. The Dutch were also in Japan, which in the

late sixteenth and early seventeenth century had expanded trade in East Asia

and Southeast Asia. The Dutch presence in Japan during the 1630s and

1640s had been limited to the port of Nagasaki, as Japan rejected more than

superficial contacts with foreigners. As in the case of China, the Japanese

exhibited little knowledge of or interest in other cultures.

French forts and settlements dotted the North American colony of Nou­

velle (New) France. French trappers established posts on the Mississippi

River, with the port of New Orleans at its mouth far to the south. The ter­

ritories claimed by the French, on which they had only scattered military

and trading posts, almost tripled in size by the middle of the eighteenth

century, but by the 1760s the French population of Nouvelle France stood

at only about 80,000 people.