The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies: And the Decline of the Caravan Trade

About this book

In this work Neils Steensgaard combines an analytical economic approach with detailed historic scholarship to provide an imaginitive and important analysis of a central incident in modern world history. The event is the breaking of the Portuguese monopoly on Asian trade in the seventeenth century by English and Dutch mercantile interests. This change the author demonstrates was not simply the triumph of the new powers over the old. Rather the Dutch--English victory heralded a structural change in international the triumph of entrepreneurial capitalism over the older economic mode of the "peddler-merchant."Professor Steensgaards study is divided into two major parts. The first examines the economic and political structure of the seventeenth century institutions in the Near East Portugal England and the Netherlands. The author demonstrates that the rise to preeminence of the English and Dutch East India Companies over the Portuguese "State of India" was the result of the superior economic and bureaucratic organization of the former. The eclipse of Portuguese power in general the author argues is best understood as an institutional failurean inability to adapt to changing patterns and demands of economic life.The second part of Professor Steensgaards study provides a detailed historical account of an important event in the fall of the Portuguese trading empirethe loss of the city of Hormuz in 1622. Hormuz located at a strategic point at the entrance of the Persian Gulf was a central port city on the Asian trade route. It fell to an English and Persian force. The author demonstrates why this event exemplifies the Portuguese institutional weaknesses that are discussed in the first part of the book.