Trade & global routes

Topics represented

British Empire (32) · Companies, trade & extraction (23) · Trade & global routes (20) · Colonization & sovereignty (15) · Slavery & coerced labor (12) · Law & imperial government (11) · Oceans, navigation & cartography (11) · Empire, trade & power (8) · Resistance & colonized agency (8) · Ocean navigation (7) · War & conquest (6) · Nautical cartography (5)

Records and sources

Ordered by start date. Long lives and processes may begin before the period you want to study.

1. c. 7000 BCE–c. 4500 BCE

   Neolithic obsidian exchange between Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Balkans

   Obsidian characterization makes it possible to trace links among communities in western Anatolia, the Aegean, and the Balkans from the late seventh to the mid-fifth millennium BCE. The distribution of an identifiable raw material demonstrates mobility and interregional exchange, but does not by itself reveal who carried each piece, whether markets existed, or uniform political and social relations.

2. c. 5500 BCE–c. 4000 BCE

   Ubaid maritime exchange in the Persian Gulf

   Boat remains and the distribution of Ubaid pottery in the Persian Gulf support maritime contacts between Mesopotamian and Arabian communities during the sixth and fifth millennia BCE. The evidence is fragmentary and suggests different mechanisms—including ceremony, status, and exchange—not regular high-volume commerce or a route controlled by one authority.

3. c. 3000 BCE–c. 1300

   Austronesian maritime dispersals across the Indo-Pacific

   Austronesian-speaking communities expanded over millennia through Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and as far as Madagascar. This broad period combines distinct migrations rather than one expedition and shows how vessels, environmental navigation, and cultural transmission connected more than half the planet.

4. c. 2600 BCE–c. 1900 BCE

   Bronze Age networks between Mesopotamia, the Gulf, and the Indus

   Bronze Age objects and raw materials support movement by land and sea routes between southern Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the Indus Valley. The Metropolitan Museum cautions that distances are great and the evidence sparse and contradictory; this entry therefore records material connections, not proven direct voyages between every endpoint or a uniformly integrated economy.

5. c. 1950 BCE–c. 1730 BCE

   Old Assyrian merchant archives between Aššur and Kanesh

   Some 23,000 cuneiform texts from Kültepe-Kanesh document exchange between Aššur and Anatolian kingdoms, including textiles, tin, silver, and levies. They are an exceptional source on contracts, credit, and caravans, but belong chiefly to those who wrote and preserved archives; they do not fully represent workers, families, debtors, or communities affected by the circuit.

6. c. 1500 BCE–c. 500 BCE

   Formative Mesoamerican obsidian exchange

   Obsidian provenance analyses make it possible to reconstruct regional and interregional networks during Mesoamerica’s Early and Middle Formative periods. Modes of procurement and circulation changed among sites and periods and could combine household exchange, reciprocity, gifts, and other arrangements. This entry assumes neither one market nor modern economic categories for every community.

7. c. 1300 BCE

   The Uluburun shipwreck and eastern Mediterranean cargoes

   The Uluburun wreck preserves a cargo of metals, glass, ivory, ebony, and objects of diverse origins, evidence of Late Bronze Age maritime connections. A shipwreck is an exceptional snapshot, not a statistical record of all Mediterranean commerce; nor does it allow trade, diplomatic gifts, tribute, or personal belongings to be separated with certainty for each object.

8. c. 1100 BCE–c. 600 BCE

   Phoenician ports and Mediterranean exchange networks

   Phoenician cities developed and renewed maritime connections with Egypt, the Aegean, and later other Mediterranean ports; archaeology of settlements and objects traces part of those networks. They were not a unified empire or a homogeneous merchant community. Trade, settlement, resource extraction, tribute, war, and competition among cities and local populations intertwined in variable ways.

9. c. 522 BCE–c. 330 BCE

   Achaemenid roads, commerce, and imperial administration

   In the Achaemenid Empire, the so-called Royal Road was one of several caravan routes linked to service stations and imperial administration; other roads connected Babylon, Central Asia, India, and the Gulf. These infrastructures facilitated exchange, but also messages, troops, taxation, and control of conquered territories. They were neither one continuous highway nor a space of commerce free from imperial coercion.

10. c. 139 BCE–c. 220

    Central Asian networks under the Han and the so-called Silk Roads

    From the second century BCE, exchanges of high-value goods between China, Central Asia, Western Asia, and the Mediterranean intensified through multiple routes and intermediaries. “Silk Road” is a modern label for networks that had no single name and included diplomacy, war, taxation, and local commerce as well as long journeys. Zhang Qian’s mission was diplomatic, not a simple commercial opening.

11. c. 50

    Periplus of the Erythraean Sea records Indian Ocean routes

    Around the mid-first century, an anonymous Greek-speaking merchant described ports, goods, and sailing seasons from the Red Sea to East Africa and India. The text preserves one merchant perspective, yet documents systematic use of monsoons within networks already shared by many peoples.

12. c. 50–c. 200

    The *Periplus of the Erythraean Sea* and western Indian Ocean circuits

    The *Periplus*, a text from the early imperial period, describes ports, routes, and exchange possibilities from Roman Egypt through the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. It is a Greek-speaking mercantile perspective, not a neutral or exhaustive map of every connected society; it records selective practical information and does not demonstrate Roman control over networks sustained by African, Arabian, and South Asian navigators and authorities.

13. c. 700–c. 1450

    Trans-Saharan trade: gold, salt, and enslaved people

    Caravans connected the Sahel, Sahara, and Mediterranean through gold, salt, textiles, and other goods under diverse authorities and intermediaries. They also sustained the capture, purchase, and forced movement of enslaved people: violence constitutive of these networks, not an equivalent commodity or side effect. Arabic sources and later archives are uneven; they must be read alongside archaeology, oral traditions, and the histories of African societies.

14. c. 750–c. 1250

    Indian Ocean ports and networks in the Abbasid era

    Ports, fortified inlets, and coastal settlements in southern Arabia provide archaeological evidence of links among the Red Sea, East Africa, India, and China, especially in the Abbasid era. The finds show port connectivity, not a network directed from Baghdad or identical participation by every coast; sailors, producers, local authorities, and merchants operated under changing political and ecological regimes.

15. c. 830

    Belitung shipwreck evidences a trans-Asian sea route

    A sewn vessel of Arab tradition sank near Belitung carrying tens of thousands of objects from Tang China. The wreck provides material evidence of ninth-century navigation linking China, Southeast Asia, and West Asia, although the ship’s exact origin and final destination remain uncertain.

16. c. 1150–c. 1450

    Hanseatic League: ports, privileges, and goods

    From the twelfth century, communities of merchants and later Hanseatic cities linked Baltic and North Sea ports through *kontors*, privileges, and documented agreements. Dried fish, grain, timber, furs, wax, salt, and textiles circulated through these networks. Documents preserve the voice of privileged cities and merchants disproportionately; they do not prove total control of prices or routes or substitute for the experiences of crews, apprentices, and producers.

17. c. 1270–c. 1500

    Portolan charts for Mediterranean coasts and bearings

    From the late thirteenth century, manuscript charts represented ports and coastlines with bearing networks useful for Mediterranean voyages. They did not account for Earth’s curvature or solve ocean navigation by themselves, but turned accumulated pilots’ experience into a reusable graphic medium.

18. c. 1375

    Catalan Atlas: routes, power, and cosmography

    The atlas attributed to the Jewish Majorcan cartographer Abraham Cresques combined portolan techniques with geographic, political, economic, and legendary information about the known world. It was a courtly cosmography rather than simply a shipboard chart, showing how maps and patronage organized knowledge and power.

19. 1405–1433

    Zheng He’s seven maritime expeditions

    Fleets dispatched by the Ming court under Zheng He made seven expeditions through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to Arabia and East Africa. They were state diplomatic, commercial, and military projects; their end does not prove a uniform Chinese retreat from the sea or the end of private Asian navigation.

20. c. 1450

    Fra Mauro world map synthesizes travelers’ knowledge

    Fra Mauro’s monumental Venetian world map assembled thousands of inscriptions and knowledge from texts, merchants, and travelers around 1450. It marks a transition between medieval cosmography and new nautical information, yet represents the world known through its informant networks rather than a neutral, complete view of the planet.

21. 1490

    Ibn Mājid compiles Indian Ocean nautical knowledge

    Aḥmad ibn Mājid assembled in the Kitāb al-Fawāʾid treatises on routes, ports, landfalls, directions, and astronomical navigation across the Indian Ocean and neighboring seas. The work establishes a written Arab deep-sea tradition on its own merits; it does not treat the claim that Ibn Mājid personally piloted Vasco da Gama as fact.

22. 1494

    Tordesillas draws an imperial line across the ocean

    Castile and Portugal agreed on a pole-to-pole demarcation line 370 leagues west of Cape Verde to divide spheres of expansion. Without a reliable way to determine longitude at sea or consent from affected peoples, a cartographic and legal abstraction claimed authority over territories and oceans unknown to both crowns.

23. c. 1500–c. 1650

    Atlantic sugar plantations and enslaved labour

    In Portuguese Atlantic islands, Brazil, and by the mid-seventeenth century parts of the Caribbean, sugar expansion was linked to the capture, sale, and forced labour of enslaved Africans. Plantations were regimes of violence, dispossession, and resistance, not simple productive units; rhythms, scales, and mortality rates varied by colony and are not fixed here as single figures. Commercial wealth depended on these coercive relations and on their contestation.

24. c. 1505–c. 1650

    Estado da Índia: fortresses, factories, and strategic ports

    Portugal entered already established Indian Ocean networks through the Estado da Índia, a web of fortresses, factories, and coastal cities from East Africa to Macao. Seizing and regulating ports sought to alter flows and collect revenue, but did not create Indian Ocean commerce or control it completely: Asian authorities, navigators, merchants, and European competitors retained decisive capacities. Naval and colonial coercion were part of the regime, not merely a logistical innovation.

25. 1519–1522

    Magellan–Elcano expedition circumnavigates the planet

    The Spanish expedition begun by Ferdinand Magellan and completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano made the first documented circumnavigation. It joined the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans in one route at enormous human cost and within an imperial contest over spices and sea lanes.

26. 1533–1603

    Elizabeth I

    Queen of England from 1558, Elizabeth I authorized ventures in exploration, privateering and trade that preceded the British Empire. Her 1600 charter created the East India Company as an English trading monopoly across much of the Asian world. Her profile does not turn those fragile projects into an already formed empire: it shows how the Crown delegated capital, risk and violence to companies and private actors

27. c. 1571–c. 1650

    Silver circuits between Potosí, Manila, and China

    After Manila’s colonial foundation in 1571, American silver circulated toward the Philippines and China in exchange for textiles, porcelain, spices, and other Asian goods; Potosí was a central node, not the sole source or a single route. This circuit depended on colonial extraction, tribute, trans-Pacific transport, and Asian intermediaries. Sources do not justify one fixed volume of silver or reduce Chinese or American economies to passive demand.

28. 1583

    Humphrey Gilbert claims Newfoundland for England

    At St John’s, Gilbert proclaimed English possession of Newfoundland and adjacent seas within a multinational fishery and the homelands of Beothuk, Inuit, and other peoples. The act did not immediately create an effective colony and should be shown as a contested imperial claim

29. 1600

    Elizabeth I charters the East India Company

    The charter incorporated London merchants and granted them an English monopoly on trade from the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Magellan. A private trading corporation would gradually become a fiscal, military, and territorial power in Asia

30. c. 1627–c. 1650

    Colonization of Barbados and the shift to slave-based sugar plantations

    English settlers occupied Barbados in 1627; over subsequent decades, sugar, consolidated estates, and the mass importation of enslaved Africans displaced much small production and European indentured labor. The “Barbados model” joined capital, monoculture, racial law, and social and environmental devastation