Sublime

John Jourdain

Apart from a very limited amount of state sponsorship, it was usually the prospect of commercial gain or of new lands for settlement which funded exploration – a misleading term, which usually signified the ‘mapping’ of existing trade paths through local informants. But the propulsion of economic or demographic need was spasmodic at best.

This was a sophisticated mercantile economy in which paper money was supplied by private enterprise and credit was based on the sale of contracts for the future supply of salt to the government – a commodity for which demand was exceptionally stable.

William Keeling,

William Adams

By the sixteenth century it was clear enough that Europe’s comparative advantage over other Eurasian civilizations lay in its precocious development of marine activity. The simultaneous growth of long-distance trade with the Americas and India was one sign of this. Another was the rise of the huge cod fishery in the North Atlantic,

Sir Henry Garraway,

Sir Christopher Clitherow