What brought East and West into contact in modern times was commerce. But it was the occidental who came out to seek the riches of Cathay, and not the other way. The dominant fact for nearly three hundred years of their commercial intercourse, from the 16th to the 19th century, was that the westerner desired the goods of the East and was able to offer little merchandise in return. Until the epoch of machine production, when technical supremacy enabled the West to fashion the whole world into a single economy, it was the East which was the more advanced in most of the industrial arts. During the early 18th century British textile manufacturers fought successfully to secure Parliamentary protection against the East India Company's imports of calicoes, wrought silks, muslins and other fabrics, with which they were not yet able to compete. There were a whole series of protective Acts passed in the reigns of William III, Anne, and George I against the imports of Eastern fabrics, and culminating in the prohibition of certain categories, especially calicoes. As late as the 1830s, the market intelligence sent out by Jardine Matheson & Co., Canton, to their correspondents spoke of the superiority of the Chinese native ‘nankeen’ cotton cloth over Manchester cotton goods in point of quality and cost.

The colourful commerce between the Red and Yellow Seas, which existed long before the European ventured eastwards, defies statistical measurement; but in the aggregate it must have been enormous.