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Across the United States, individuals and small businesses are increasingly buying and selling goods and services online. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the total value of online transactions in the United States grew from $3 trillion in 2006 to $5.4 trillion in 2012, about a third of U.S. GDP. Increasingly, these transactions are cross border. By 2017, a third of U.S. business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce transactions will be with foreign counterparts, up from 16 percent today.

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 trade: the triumph of entrepreneurial capitalism over the older economic mode of the "peddler-merchant." Professor Steensgaard's 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 failure–an inability to adapt to changing patterns and demands of economic life. The second part of Professor Steensgaard's study provides a detailed historical account of an important event in the fall of the Portuguese trading empire–the 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.

Following the series’ first book How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World, this book continues to demonstrate how maritime trade has been the key driver of the world’s wealth-creation, economic and intellectual progress. The story begins where the first book ends, when following Roman Empire collapse, 7th-century European maritime trade almost ceased, creating population collapse and poverty; the Dark Ages. In 700, stuttering, hesitant recovery was evident with new ports but Viking and Muslim maritime raiding neutered recovery until the 11th century. In Asia by contrast, short and long-haul trade thrived and accelerated from east Africa and the Persian Gulf all the way to China, encouraging Southeast Asian state formation. The book tells the story of slowly rising, gradually accelerating European maritime trade, which until the 15th century was overshadowed by far more voluminous Asian trade in much larger, more complex ships traded by more sophisticated commercial entities, contributing to innovative tolerant wealth-creating maritime societies. In Europe, Mediterranean maritime trade made most progress from about 1000 to 1450. But by 1700, north Europeans dominated Atlantic, American and Mediterranean trade and were penetrating sophisticated Asian maritime networks, a complete reversal. This book explains how and why and how destructive continental influences destroyed Asia’s maritime supremacy. As in the first book, Nick Collins finds similar patterns; maritime inquisitiveness, invention, problem-solving and toleration and continental political suppression of those maritime traits, most dramatically in China, but destructively everywhere, allowing the millennium maritime trade revolution.

A study of the growth of international trade from the 15th through to the 17th century. This collection of articles examines topics such as the emergence of new world trade routes, trade in particular goods and commodities, European trade policies and mercantilism.

Does commerce have a personality in the early modern era? The selection of papers offered here attempts to answer the question in various ways. Illustrating the intercontinental trading activities of the four main trading nations - Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, Britain - together with the smaller participants like France, Prussia, and Scandinavia, the editors draw out the differences in commercial organisation and the aspirations of merchants. Particular forms of organisation such as joint-stock monopolies feature heavily in the treatment adopted here, and there are discussions of mercantalism, privateering and piracy. The volume identifies a first expansion circuit in which crown participation in intercontinental trade was vital, and a second expansion circuit, more integrated with European trade, where merchants cooperated for self-interest rather than at the direct behest of government.

While Spanish traders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mining the riches of the New World, the Portuguese continued to reap the lucrative Asian trade in spices and luxury items. Historians have long considered the Portuguese trade the exclusive enterprise of the kings of Portugal and a few privileged aristocrats, with only minimal participation by private merchants. But in fact, argues James C. Boyajian, actual capital investments by private Portuguese merchants were roughly ten times those of the Portuguese crown - and even exceeded those of the far larger Dutch East India Company. In Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, Boyajian reassesses the consequences of Portugal's flourishing private trade with Asia, including increased tensions between the growing urban merchant class and the still-dominant landed aristocracy. He also shows how Portuguese-Asian trade formed part of a global trading network that linked not only Europe and Asia but also - for the first time - Asia, West Africa, Brazil, and Spanish America. And he argues that, contrary to previous scholarly opinion, nearly half of the Portuguese-Asian trade was controlled by New Christians - descendants of Iberian Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in the 1490s. Ironically, Boyajian concludes, the vast wealth that flowed into Portugal between 1580 and 1640 did little to enrich the country. Landed aristocrats who controlled the church, the Inquisition, and the royal administration used their position to deny merchants the social standing that would encourage productive investments in Portugal. And by the seventeenth century, the Portuguese-Asian trade itself was doomed - the result, Boyajian argues, not of the much-heralded Dutch economic successes but of Dutch naval blockades that effectively severed Portugal's trading lifeline with Asia.