The essays appearing in this volume were originally prepared for distribution and discussion at a conference on “The Rise of Merchant Empires” sponsored by the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota in October 1987. I wish to record here our gratitude for the funding support we received from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bigelow Foundation of St. Paul, and the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts.

As we began planning for the conference in the spring of 1984, we were conscious that the topics we wanted to address are truly universal in scope. In recent years there have been some notable attempts at universal synthesis, such as Fernand Braudel's three volumes on Commerce and Civilization and Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System. But as critics have noted, it is uncommonly difficult for matters of such complexity to be filtered through the prism of a single mind or framed in the assumptions of a single ideological perspective. Hence we directed our attention toward a group effort at intermediate-level syntheses, each limited to a given region but informed by an awareness of larger questions. Even as our planning proceeded, a number of important works characterized by this kind of intellectual ambition issued from the presses: K. N. Chaudhuri's Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean; John McCusker and Russell Menard's The Economy of British America; India, and the Indian Ocean, 1500–1800, a collection of essays on trade edited by Ashin Das Gupta and M. N. Pearson; and Ralph Austen's African Economic History.