European dominance of the shipping lanes in the early modern period was a prelude to the great age of European imperial power, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet in the present age of a new global interdependence we can see that the pre-imperial age was in fact more an "age of partnership" or an "age of competition" when Westerners and Asians vied on even terms. The essays in this volume examine on a global basis the many different trading empires from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.