ign trade of Europe two
centuries after the opening of the maritime route to India and the
discovery of America would probably give more reason to be surprised at
the smallness than the magnitude of the use that had been made of these
events.

19th century.

By the beginning of the 19th century the world had been well explored.
Colonies had been planted on every coast; great nations had sprung up in
vast solitudes or in countries inhabited only by savage or decadent
races of men; the most haughty and exclusive of ancient nations had
opened their ports to foreign merchantmen; and all parts of the world
been brought into habitual commercial intercourse. The seas, subdued by
the progress of navigation to the service of man, had begun to yield
their own riches in great abundance and the whale, seal, herring, cod
and other fisheries, prosecuted with ample capital and hardy seamanship,
had become the source of no small traffic in themselves. The lists of
imports and exports and of the places from which they flowed to and from
the centres of trade, as they swelled in bulk from time to time, show
how busily and steadily the threads of commerce had been weaving
together the labour and interests of mankind, and extending a security
and bounty of existence unknown in former ages. The 19th century
witnessed an extension of the commercial relations of mankind of which
there was no parallel in previous history. The heavy debts and taxes,
and the currency complications in which the close of the Napoleonic wars
left the European nations, as well as the fall of prices which was the
necessary effect of the sudden closure of a vast war expenditure and
absorption of labour, had a crippling effect for many years on trading
energies. Yet even under such circumstances commerce is usually found,
on its well-established modern basis, to make steady progress from one
series of years to another. The powers of production had been greatly
increased by a brilliant development of mechanical arts and inventions.
The United States had grown into a commercial nation of the first rank.
The European colonies and settlements were being extended, and
assiduously cultivated, and were opening larger and more varied markets
for manufactures. In 1819 the first steamboat crossed the Atlantic from
New York to Liverpool, and a similar adventure was accomplished from
England to India in 1825--events in themselves the harbingers of a new
era in trade. China, a