The main objective of this book is to dispel some of the conventionally held views surrounding trade between Europe and Asia in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. For instance, through a comparative and comprehensive study of merchant communities, markets and commodities the individual authors demonstrate that Asian merchants were in no way inferior to Europeans in terms of their commercial operations and business acumen. The book as a whole attempts to view trade between Europe and Asia in its totality and emphasizes similarities rather than differences in the two regions.

List of contributors; Preface; Introduction Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau; Part I. Asia, Especially India, Around 1500: 1. Of what world-system was pre-1500 'India' a part? Ravi Arvind Palat and Immanuel Wallerstein; 2. Trade in the Indian Ocean at the dawn of the sixteenth century Geneviève Bouchon; Part II. Routes, Markets and Merchants: 3. The route through Quandahar: the significance of the overland trade from India to the West in the seventeenth century Niels Steensgaard; 4. The Armenian merchant network: overall autonomy and local integration Michel Aghassian and Kéram Kévonian; 5. Commercial relations between India and the Ottoman Empire (late fifteenth to late eighteenth centuries): a few notes and hypotheses Gilles Veinstein; 6. Eastern and Western merchants from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries Michel Morineau; 7. The other 'species' world: specification of commodities and moneys, and the knowledge-base of commerce, 1500-1900 Frank Perlin; Part III. European Presence in Asia: 8. The Portuguese and the Dutch in Asian maritime trade: a comparative analysis Om Prakash; 9. Competition or collaboration? Relations between the Dutch East India Company and Indian merchants around 1680 Femme S. Gaastra; 10. The French India Company and its trade in the eighteenth century Philippe Haudrère; 11. Sweden and India in the eighteenth century: Sweden's difficulty in gaining access to a crowded market C. Koninckx; 12. The ambitions of the Austrian Empire with reference to East India during the last quarter of the eighteenth century Helma Houtman-de Smedt; Part IV. Implications of Trade: Asia and Europe: 13. The Indian challenge: seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Michel Morineau; 14. The changing pattern of British trade in Indian textiles, 1701-1757 Dietmar Rothermund; 15. French traders and India at the end of the eighteenth century Paul Butel; 16. The Asian merchants and companies in Bengal's export trade, circa mid-eighteenth century Sushil Chaudhury; Index.