INTRODUCTION

Intercontinental trade in the period known variously as the age of commercial capitalism and the age of European expansion is a well studied but still-elusive field of historical research. Numerous detailed studies on particular branches of trade, areas of production, commercial routes, or points of distribution, often based on sources that make quantification possible, offer a mass of information on various aspects of the history of trade. At the same time the totality remains elusive; the information is not easily compared or summed up, not even when it happens to be complete and reliable. Any attempt to sum up our knowledge of the volume and composition of early modern long-distance trade must remain preliminary and open to revision.

More than twenty-five years ago F. Mauro appealed to his colleagues to cooperate internationally in order to reconstruct the commodity flows between continents in this period. Since then more details and better statistical information have been uncovered, but his plea for cooperation among scholars was not heard, and today we are not much closer to a comprehensive understanding of the economic interrelations between the continents in the early modern period than we were twenty-five years ago. It is to be hoped that this volume will be a step in the right direction, especially because of the growing interest, not only among historians, in the history of intercontinental trade in the early modern period.