The Latin concept of commercium, and the French, English, and German understandings of commerce that derive from it, refer not only to market trade and economic arrangements, but also to communication, exchange, and interaction more generally. While the history of seaborne and oceanic trade is extensive, as Diderot, Smith, and Kant acknowledge in their many references to ancient seafaring trading routes, in many writings before the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, oceans were described as providentially disruptive of contact, communication, and trade. In the eighteenth century, there were strong concerns about global interconnections. The Enlightenment historiography of global travel, trade, contact, communication, and indeed often conquest, occupation, and slavery, includes many works that deal with some aspects of these developments and practices, but only in some key late Enlightenment writings can one find philosophically informed and empirically detailed accounts of the wide array of transcontinental connections from the 1490s onward.