In planning the conference on merchant empires that formed the basis for this collection of papers, the Early Modern Group at Minnesota originally included diverse topics under the general headings of northern and southern Europe. This paper was designed to provide a general background for the long-distance trade of southern Europe between 1350 and 1750, surveying the published literature on Mediterranean and Iberian trade in those crucial centuries. The inquiry was to be limited to long-distance trade outside Europe, omitting discussion of internal European commercial networks. In this way we hoped to clarify the role of merchants and trade in establishing European influence around the globe. In other words, the focus of the conference was not on the growth of world trade in the early modern period but on the role of European merchants and their governments in furthering world trade. Primarily for that reason, we decided not to include lengthy discussion of the Ottoman Empire, although the interaction of Christian Europe with the Islamic world was crucial to the development of global commerce in many ways. In Immanuel Wallerstein's terminology, the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth century was a separate world-system from Europe, uniting an economic and trading network with political authority and distributive power. The Ottoman system would be absorbed by the expanding capitalist world-economy after 1750, but for the whole of the period considered here, it remained a separate, autonomous system, linked with Europe by a trade in luxury goods.