In the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, there is an ivory chess set, made for Tippu Sultan of Mysore during the late eighteenth century. One set of chessmen represents an Indian princely army, whose soldiers wield swords and hold shields; their adversaries, however, are the European officers and native infantry of the British East India Company – all in uniform, and all impressively equipped with firearms. This contrast neatly symbolizes a central feature of European overseas expansion since the Middle Ages: namely, the absolute or relative superiority of Western weaponry and Western military organization over all others. Amid the wealth of statistics on Europe's import of Asian spices, on the silver production of colonial America, or on the export of African slaves, it is easy to forget that each of these lucrative economic enterprises rested in the last analysis upon force. Although other chapters in this volume stress lower transaction costs as a key explanation of Europe's commercial expansion, it was often a minor consideration overseas, where even the sharpest and most sophisticated business methods would scarcely have been competitive without the sanction of superior force on the part of the Western merchants. As Irfan Habib put it in his perceptive contribution to The Rise of Merchant Empires: