Early Modern

Da Gama reached Calicut in 1498 with help from a pilot at Malindi, breaking the Venice and Mamluk controlled Red Sea axis and movi...

European ships loaded textiles, guns and spirits for West Africa, traded for captive people, crossed the Middle Passage to the Car...

After 1565, when Andres de Urdaneta worked out the eastbound return by riding north to the westerlies, one or two galleons a year ...

The flota system gathered merchant ships and escorts into scheduled convoys: one to Veracruz for Mexican silver and cochineal, one...

The VOC ran scheduled services from Amsterdam to Batavia via the Cape, including the Brouwer route that rode the roaring forties a...

The Cerro Rico strike of 1545 turned Potosi, in modern Bolivia, into one of the world's largest cities within decades, worked by t...

European felt hats made beaver fur a commodity for three centuries. French traders ran from the St Lawrence through the Great Lake...

Imperial edict confined European commerce to Guangzhou, Canton, where licensed Cohong merchants guaranteed foreign conduct and tra...

From the 15th century, coffee grown in Yemen's highlands moved through Mocha to Cairo, Istanbul and, via Venetian and Levantine tr...

The volta do mar, turning to sea, seems paradoxical: to reach a port to the south you sail west into open ocean to catch the retur...

The Treaty of Kyakhta of 1727 fixed the border between the Russian and Qing empires and made the twin settlements of Kyakhta and M...

Opened northward behind the silver strikes of Zacatecas and extended by the colonizing expedition of Juan de Onate in 1598, the ro...

From the late medieval period, and on a vast scale from the 16th century as wood grew scarce, colliers carried sea coal from the T...

Pierre-Paul Riquet persuaded Louis XIV to back a canal from Toulouse to the Etang de Thau near Sete, and work from 1666 to 1681 pr...

An ancient northern route across the Gangetic plain existed in Mauryan times, but Sher Shah Suri rebuilt it in the 1540s with cara...