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Around the year 1757, a Turkish man, born in Constantinople, educated in Paris, and a former servant of the French East India Company in south India, boarded an English ship in Bombay. This Turk, variously known as Mustafa or Monsieur Raymond, quickly made friends with the English captain of the ship, a Mr Ranier. Mustafa described Ranier as possessing a ‘general benevolence for mankind’, and an ‘uprightness’, virtues that soon seemed to him to be ‘characteristical in the English’. Captain Ranier and Mustafa became friends, partly because, in Mustafa's own words, ‘I had learned his tongue with a rapidity that amazed us both’; with a mediocre dictionary and a bad grammar, I learned enough of English in the nineteen days from Bombay to Balassor, as to delight in Bolingbroke's philosophical works. The English itself is no ways Difficult, and to a man already master of some Latin and French it is a very easy acquisition. The story of a French-educated Turk, on an English ship in the Indian ocean, reading one of the pre-eminent political philosophers of eighteenth-century Britain is a vivid illustration of the dizzying transpositions involved in the expansion of British power in Asia. Mustafa stayed in Bengal, and made a fitful career out of service to high-ranking officers of the English East India Company as they laid the foundations of the British empire in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is impossible, Mr Speaker, not to pause here for a moment, to reflect on the inconstancy of human greatness, and the stupendous revolutions that have happened in our age of wonders. Could it be believed when I entered into existence, or when you, a younger man, were born, that on this day, in this house, we should be employed in discussing the conduct of those British subjects who had disposed of the power and person of the Grand Mogul? This is no idle speculation. Awful lessons are taught by it, and by other events, of which it is not too late to profit. Edmund Burke's pregnant pause invited the commons of Great Britain to gaze on the lonely, impoverished emperor of Hindustan, and to beware the fate of empires. Seven years after the publication of the first volume of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, imperial history appeared to Burke as the record of ‘awful lessons’. Britain's own imperial destiny hung in the balance. Her colonies in North America, after a long and bitter struggle, were breaking off to build a new model of republican liberty, much heralded by radicals in Britain itself. Meanwhile, a British trading company, the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies (or East India Company for short), had conquered a ‘vast mass’ of territories, ‘larger than any European dominion, Russia and Turkey excepted’, ‘composed of so many orders and classes of men … infinitely diversified by manners, by religion, by hereditary employments, through all their possible combinations’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Warren Hastings (governor of Bengal from 1772 and governor-general of the British territories in India from 1774 to 1785) stands not least among those ‘imperial icons’ that dominated old pro-consular histories, and his dramatic career has launched a large shelf-full of biographies. Hastings' particular genius, in some old versions, was for seeing beyond the vacillations and hesitations of his colleagues, and masterfully grasping Britain's historic destiny as an imperial power. For others, following the famous attacks on his character by Edmund Burke and Lord Macaulay, Hastings' career stood as a horrifying example of the dangers of imperial hubris and brutality. Another durable and more sympathetic tradition has cast Hastings as an enlightened cosmopolitan and ‘orientalist’ in the non-pejorative, pre-Saidian sense of that word – a notable patron of Indian arts and scholarship. This chapter tries to understand Hastings' governorship against the swirling backdrop of Company politics in the 1760s and early 1770s. It argues that Warren Hastings' attempts to reform the Bengal government in the early 1770s did indeed constitute a critical moment in the refashioning of the English East India Company as a branch of empire. This was not, however, because Hastings had visions, as if through a crystal ball, of the later history of British India. Hastings' reforms were part of a wider pattern of crisis management, as the East India Company confronted the aftermath of the Bengal famine and growing financial and political problems in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impey's regulations for the civil courts were a sign of the future. While parliamentary speeches extolled the beneficence of British rule in preserving the laws of India from alien invasion, the official language of the Company government of Bengal was gradually moving away from the idea of the ancient Mughal constitution. Debates over the Supreme Court appeared to reveal the fragility of ‘custom and usage’ and the irregular nature of a territorial administration buffeted by war, conquest and famine. Meanwhile, the gradual extension of parliamentary oversight offered a new source of legality independent of the Mughal constitution. This chapter outlines how the idea of colonial state-building as constitutional restoration slowly dissolved in the new political climate of the 1780s and 1790s. Crucially, the empire of the Company was now more fully absorbed into the British imperial state. From the mid-1780s a more unified brand of British imperialism moved away from divisive disputes about the Mughal past, and announced itself more confidently as a decisive break from the history of Asiatic tyranny. As the East India Company service rebranded itself as a purified agency of imperial virtue, the entrenched critique of Asiatic manners finally overwhelmed the more fragile sense of Mughal imperium as a viable form of sovereignty. In the 1770s, Warren Hastings and Philip Francis, armed with competing visions of the Mughal constitution, had fought to a stalemate. Hastings' absolutist interpretation of Mughal sovereignty, tempered by ancient legal traditions, provoked Francis' assertion of an ancient constitution of property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mir Qasim (1760–3) was the last nawab of Bengal to aspire to any real measure of independence from the Company's control. In 1763–4, the Company's army comprehensively defeated the combined forces of Mir Qasim, Shuja-ud-daula (nawab of the northern province of Awadh and vizier of the Mughal empire) and the impoverished Mughal emperor himself, Shah Alam II. From this point on, the Company was clearly the dominant military power in eastern India, even if Company officials still feared Maratha invasions from the west and the possibility of French attacks from the sea. The nawab of Awadh was forced to pay a hefty tribute to the Company, and his military capacities were deliberately circumscribed. The captured emperor was settled under the protection of the Company's forces in Allahabad, and by a treaty of 1765 he appointed the Company as diwan of Bengal, an office described by Alexander Dow as the ‘receiver-general of the Imperial revenues in the province’. Mir Jafar, and after him his sons, held the office of nazim or imperial governor of Bengal, but they were in effect pensioners of the Company. Robert Clive, the governor of Bengal from 1765–7 who engineered the grant of the diwani, wrote to the directors that we must ‘become the Nabob ourselves in fact, if not in name’. The years after the grant of the diwani were crucial in the political education of the East India Company service in Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘age of revolutions’ arrived early in India, nowhere more so than in Bengal. Contemporary Britons frequently used the term ‘revolutions’ in describing the East India Company's rise to military and political pre-eminence in eastern India, and Indo-Persian sources used a similar term, inqilab. Academic histories of this period of revolutions have been mainly structured around explanations of British ‘expansion’ or imperialism. They have tended to focus on key moments of war and conquest in the 1750s and 1760s as the Company subjugated the faltering regime of the Bengal nawabs. In analysing these events, historians have weighed the role of different causal factors: the expansion of European commerce and Anglo-French wars in south India; Mughal decline and instability within Indian regional states; the corrosive effects of British ‘private trade’ on Indian polities; or the inexorable momentum of militarization. By contrast, this chapter seeks to understand the shifting institutional and ideological settings in which contemporary Britons themselves interpreted the various revolutions in Bengal. The aim here, and in chapter 2, is to probe the links between processes of conquest and colonial state-formation, and to show how narratives of conquest fed into ideologies of rule. Two points in particular are emphasized in this analysis. First, while historians have generally privileged material incentives for the Company's territorial expansion, especially expanded access to the markets of Bengal, and new revenues from territorial revenues, it is important to see how these material interests were embedded in particular institutional and ideological contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fourteenth century, South Asia became a region of travel and transport connecting Central Asia and the Indian Ocean. This redefined the location of all its agrarian territories. In the wake of the Mongols, overland corridors of routine communication extended from the Silk Road to Kanya Kumari and branched out to seaports along the way. Connections among distant parts of Eurasia became numerous and routine. New technology, ideas, habits, languages, people and needs came into farming communities. New elements entered local cuisine. People produced new powers of command, accumulation, and control, focused on strategic urban sites in agrarian space. By 1600, ships sailed between China, Gujarat, Europe, and America. Horses trotted across the land between Tajikistan and Egypt, Moscow and Madurai. Camels caravaned between Syria and Tibet, Ajmer, and Agra. A long expansion in world connections occurred during centuries when a visible increase in farming intensity was also reshaping agrarian South Asia. In the dry, interior uplands, warriors built late-medieval dynasties, on land formerly held by pastoralists and nomads; and sultans established a new political culture, whose hegemony would last to the nineteenth century. Slow but decisive change during late-medieval centuries laid the basis formore dramatic trends after 1500, when agricultural expansion accelerated along with the mobility and the local agrarian power of warriors and merchants. Regional formations of agrarian territory came into being, sewn together by urban networks, during a distinctively early modern period of agrarian history, whose patterns of social power, agricultural expansion, and cultural change embrace the empires of Akbar and the East India Company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nineteenth century, industrial empire brought new force into the transformation of agrarian regions. Britain controlled the corridors of mobility in southern Eurasia. English became the imperial language. A new rupee homogenised the money supply. In 1800, cowry shells from the Andamans were the currency in Sylhet, and dozens of different silver, gold, and copper coins filled markets from Surat to Chittagong. Money changers worked every corner. But in the 1820s, the Company's silver rupee set the monetary standard and market prices began a tumble that lasted thirty years. In these hard decades, markets contracted along routes of imperial expansion, real taxation increased, seasons of scarcity were common, and overseas cloth exports died. The Act of 1793 had established a permanent settlement with no survey, no records of rights, and no definite method of assessment; after 1820, zamindari settlements required the recording of rights, annual assessments of cultivated land, and periodic reassessments. Almost everywhere, routine revenue collections provoked struggles and dislocations. When indigo stocks crashed on the London exchange, Bihari peasants lost their income and tenants lost their land. The Torture Commission in Madras reported routine beatings by revenue officers. Company critics multiplied in London but could not quite topple the old regime before rebellions killed the Company in 1857. Crown rule ended an imperial crisis. Prices had begun moving upward again by 1855, and decades of inflation then steadily lowered the real cash burden of revenue and rent. Land became more attractive for investors as a veneer of modernity covered British India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long history of agriculture is of countless ecological interventions that have given nature its civility, and imparted personality to the land, as people have cut down forests, diverted rivers, built lakes, killed predators, tamed, bred, and slaughtered animals, and burnt, dug, and axed natural growth to replace it with things that people desire. Farming occurs in a land of emotion, and agrarian territories need gods, poetry, ritual, architecture, outsiders, frontiers, myths, border-lands, landmarks, and families, which give farms meaning and purpose. Together, brute power and refined aesthetics culture the land, and war is so prominent in old poetry because making a homeland is violent business. In the long span of agrarian history, therefore, a great variety of skills have combined to make nature a natural environment, and agrarian territories have emerged historically much like cuisine. Clearing the land and sculpting the fields create a place for the nurture and collection of ingredients. Skilled labour selects, cultivates, kills, dresses, chops, and grinds. Fuels, pots, knives, axes, hoes, mortar and pestle, and many other implements are involved in making all the daily meals and special feasts that sustain work, family, and community. Like a farmer's home territory, a cuisine's complexity and refinement always develop within networks of exchange and specialisation, because materials, ideas, techniques, and tastes come from many sources; but each cuisine also emerges inside spaces of cultured accumulation and experimentation, in which people experience their place in the world, territorially, as they make their very own set of special ingredients into appropriate foods for appropriate occasions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of human history in South Asia is a feature of life on the land, but most documents that we use to write agrarian history concern the state. Kautilya's Arthasastra set the tone by putting farming and herding under the heading of state revenue. Hundreds of thousands of stone and copper inscriptions appear in the first millennium of the Common Era (CE). Scattered across the land from Nepal to Sri Lanka, they documented agrarian conditions, but their purpose was rather to constitute medieval dynasties. After 1300, official documents narrate more and more powerful states. In the sixteenth century, Mughal sultans built South Asia's first empire of agrarian taxation, and their revenue assessments, collections, and entitlements produced more data on agrarian conditions than any previous regime. In 1595, Abu-l Fazl's Ai'n-i Akbari depicted agriculture in accounts of imperial finance. After 1760, English officials did the same. After 1870, nationalists rendered the country as part of the nation, and since 1947 agriculture has been a measure of national development. For two millennia, elites have recorded agrarian facts to bolster regimes and to mobilise the opposition, so we inherit a huge archive documenting agrarian aspects of historical states. Over the centuries, however, agrarian history has also moved along in farming environments, outside the institutional structure of states, almost always connected in one way or another to state authority, but embedded basically in the everyday life of agricultural communities. Dynasties expand into agrarian space. Empires incorporate farm and forest, using various degrees and types of power, gaining here, losing there, adapting to local circumstances and modifying state institutions to embrace new regions of cultivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In this final chapter, the purpose is to attempt a general characterisation of the place of trade (in particular external trade) in the political economy of sixteenth and seventeenth century southern India. In the early chapters of this study, we traced the broad outline of state structures and fiscal regimes, the evolving structure of overland and coastal trade, and its relations with overseas trade. Subsequent sections dealt in detail with long-distance overseas commerce, and with certain specific issues which arose in that context. It is in the light of the information and arguments contained in these earlier chapters that the present one will be framed. It is unfortunate but true that abstract thought on the relationship between trade, whether external or internal, and the material conditions in which they found themselves did not greatly exercise the inhabitants of southern India in the period. A few desultory remarks may be found, in treatises on royal conduct, on this theme, but these are usually normative, and do not rise above a regrettable level of vagueness. The poem Amuktamalyada, usually attributed to the Vijayanagara ruler Krishna Deva Raya [r. 1509–29] addresses the issue in two verses. The one notes: A king should govern his ports so as to increase their trade by encouraging the import of horses, elephants, gems, sandal, pearls etc.; he should offer protection suited to the conditions of their race to people who migrate from other countries, owing to famine, pestilence and calamities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction One of the major themes to be encountered in the historiography on pre-colonial trade in India is of the relationship between Asian traders, on the one hand, and the political structures of Asia, on the other. In part, this question has been addressed in the preceding chapter, for the delicate balance between Europeans and Asians, centering above all on the question of seapower, is intimately related to how Asian political structures viewed external trade. In the present chapter, however, the question of the interface between external commerce and political participation will be addressed far more directly, and it will be argued that there existed a set of persons whom we will term ‘portfolio capitalists’, occupying in the early seventeenth century the middle ground between the worlds of mercantile capitalism and political capitalism. This view should be counterposed, properly speaking, to the dominant stream of thinking on this question. Numerous writers, including Michael Pearson, K.N. Chaudhuri, and most recently S. Arasaratnam, have addressed this issue for different parts of India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pearson, whose argument was initially developed in the context of Gujarat, has since extended it to embrace much of the rest of India. He develops a picture of a society comprised of functionally defined cells in a beehive (closely identified by him with a somewhat rigid conception of caste), wherein one has a ‘militarily oriented elite’, whose ‘culturally sanctioned activities were land activities’, and were counterposed to the activities of ‘merchants’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last quarter of the sixteenth century marks the beginning of a substantial process, simultaneously of realignment and expansion, in the networks of overseas commerce involving the ports of southern India. In part, this is reflected in the rise of certain ports and the decline of others, for, as we have seen in the previous chapter, both Bhatkal and Pulicat – earlier the most substantial trading centres by far on the west and east coast respectively – now enter into decadence. These ports are not replaced by other neighbouring centres in a straightforward fashion; instead, one observes in the case of Pulicat a complex relationship with the rise of the north Coromandel port of Masulipatnam, and in the case of Bhatkal, a process of dispersion of trade to smaller centres along the west coast. The major centre of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in south-western India is Cochin, and we shall be at some pains in this chapter to trace the fortunes of this port. Our discussion must commence however with the eastern seaboard of south India, and in particular with a consideration of the fortunes of the two ports that dominate its trade in the decades from 1570 to 1650, namely Masulipatnam to the north, and Nagapattinam far to the south. The Bay of Bengal, 1570–1600: introduction It has already been suggested that the major reorientations which occurred in Coromandel's trade in the sixteenth century took place in the latter half, being linked to a set of changes we have associated with the ‘second wind’ of Portuguese impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Trade both on sea and on land in pre-colonial southern India was carried on in two sets of commodities: on the one hand, the high-value goods that for decades caused historians to tar Asian trade with the brush of a ‘splendid but trifling’ activity, on the other hand, the bulky, low value commodities, be they foodgrains or coarse manufactures. It is hazardous to identify these two sets of commodities closely with two sets of trading routes; while the metaphor of ‘rice roads’ and ‘silk roads’ may be an evocative one, there is no gainsaying the fact that the ships carrying Chinese silks or pepper frequently carried rice in quantities as well, while the coastal machuas plying the rivers and coasts of Malabar, Kanara and Coromandel carried not only paddy, areca, timber and coir, but also pepper, ginger and sandal. While most past historical studies have been concerned with the longer-distance maritime trade, the picture would remain incomplete without an analysis of two other complementary forms of trade, coastal trade and overland trade. In this chapter, we discuss these two in turn, with a view to laying the ground for a synthetic view of the interlinkages between the three forms of trade: coastal, overland and overseas. In the discussion of trade in the two chapters that follow the present one, the focus will be by and large on the more substantial and conspicuous trading centres, the ports that in K.N. Chaudhuri's terminology might be called ‘emporia’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geographical setting Peninsular India is dominated by a massive triangular plateau, with its apex to the south, which extends down its centre, beginning from the Vindhya mountains in the north, and extending as far as the tip of the peninsula in a semi-broken form. The Deccan plateau as it is called thus forms the spine of the region here termed south India, and is bordered on either side by strips of low-lying land, the coastal plains. These coastal strips are separated from the elevated flatland of the plateau in the interior by mountain ranges of great antiquity, respectively termed the eastern and western Ghats. Both the ranges are naturally more precipitous in their descent on the low-lying coastal plains than on the interior plateau, given the higher elevation of the interior region; however, the western Ghats are more formidable as a barrier than their eastern counterparts, both in terms of elevation, and in the sheer acuteness of their descent to the coastal plain. Further, the western range preserves a high degree of continuity whereas the hills of the eastern Ghats are not merely more gentle but more broken, with access to the interior from the plain thus being far freer in the east than from the west. Between these two ranges, the interior plateau slopes from the north-west to the south-east, as a consequence determining the general direction of flow of all the major peninsular rivers. Most of these begin to the east of the western Ghats, and flow eastward across the plateau to emerge from the eastern Ghats on to the Coromandel plain, eventually voiding their waters into the Bay of Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many today who would doubt whether the year 1498 marks the beginning of a wholly new epoch in the history of Asia, what the late K.M. Panikkar liked to term the ‘Vasco da Gama epoch’. As a general proposition, it would be far more acceptable to state that 1500 marks a sharp break in historiography, and that this is in large measure on account of the new sources for the writing of Asian history that make themselves available from the early sixteenth century on. The impact of these sources is particularly marked on that part of economic history which deals with the exchange economy, which is to say the study of trade. From the period of Afonso de Albuquerque, the historian has available to him an unusually rich collection of documents generated by the Portuguese presence in Asia. These tend to peter out somewhat in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, only to revive in the last twenty years of the century. The arrival of the northwest Europeans in Asia at the turn of the seventeenth century adds still further to this corpus of documentation. The archives of the trading Companies, in particular the Dutch and the English, when taken together with the scattered Portuguese documentation, represent a formidable body of data on trade and related questions. Further, in contrast to the evidence from the sixteenth century, which is sporadic and somewhat unevenly distributed over time, the Company documentation of the seventeenth century is a far more orderly set, and is particularly valuable because of the consistent and routine manner in which it is generated, and also because a relatively large proportion has survived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The age of reform With the coming of Lord William Bentinck as Governor-General in 1828, the British avowedly embarked upon a thorough-going programme of reform. Building upon what had previously been little more than a vague expectation that somehow British rule ought to bring ‘improvement’ to India, free traders, utilitarians, and evangelicals created a distinctive ideology of imperial governance shaped by the ideals of liberalism. From Bentinck's time to that of Lord Dalhousie (1848–56) this reformist sentiment gained a near universal ascendancy among the British in India. A product of the industrial revolution and the growth of a new morality, as well as of Britain's worldwide predominance after the Napoleonic wars, liberalism was in no way simply a vision of how empire ought to be organized. Informed by the thought of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, it provided a strategy for the remaking of Britain itself. A host of legislative enactments, from the Reform Bill of 1832 through the New Poor Law, the repeal of the Corn Laws and the creation of the administrative state, mark out its progress through British society. Liberalism was, to be sure, in no sense a coherent doctrine. Indeed, as Richard Bellamy has pointed out, it is a ‘notoriously elusive notion’, extremely difficult to circumscribe and to define accurately. It incorporated a variety of heterogeneous views and evolved piecemeal over a long period of social upheaval. As a result, within early Victorian England there existed liberals of many kinds. One can identify as liberals, among others, men of such diverse political views as aristocratic Whigs, classical political economists, Tory Peelites committed to economic reform, radicals, and Benthamite utilitarians. The distance separating, say, the radical John Bright from the Whig Lord Palmerston was immense. And there was, of course, no organized Liberal Party until the rise of William Gladstone in the 1860s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Seaborne trade was probably the leading sector of commercial growth in the world economy – perhaps going back as far as the ninth century, certainly from the fifteenth-century maritime revolution well into the nineteenth. The seventeenth century, however, and at least the first half of the eighteenth, marked a period of intense development in overland trade as well. This chapter will deal with overland connections between Persia and Europe, between Persia and India and East Asia, and especially with the Armenian trade diaspora that was active in the overland trade as well as the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean. In addition, and in these same centuries, new trade diasporas began to carry Euopean goods overland into regions previously served only by indirect relay trade. Siberia was one such region, as European, Chinese, and Ottoman demand for furs sent Russians eastward through the forests of northern Asia. This movement began in the middle of the sixteenth century. By the 1640s, the fur traders had found ways to use the large rivers of Siberia so as to reach the Pacific Ocean with only occasional need to portage goods from one river to another. Continuing by sea, they reached Alaska by the early eighteenth century and had explored down the North American coast to California by the early nineteenth. The same demand for furs sent European fur traders and their local agents into the North American forests with a similar timing. French trading posts on the lower Saint Lawrence from the early seventeenth century became the anchor for a trade network westward along the line of the Great Lakes to reach the Mississippi and beyond by the end of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the historian's chronic problems is uneven source material. For certain times and places, the almost-accidental generation and preservation of historical records make possible a detailed reconstruction of the past. The geniza records of medieval Cairo are a good example. For other times and places, records are scarce. It is often hard to arrive at a balanced judgment between well-described and ill-described aspects of the past. It is therefore difficult to balance the Asian against the European contribution to the commercial history of maritime Asia before the late eighteenth century. The records of the great European companies are admirably preserved in the centralized archives of Europe. Those of Asian merchants were mainly private, and no one saw much use in keeping them beyond the era of the voyages and transactions they recorded. Asian, as well as European, historians have had to work from the European records, because they are the best we have for describing Asian commerce, even where Europeans were not directly involved. As a result, the historical literature on maritime Asia in these centuries conveys the impression that the Europeans were the dynamic factor, directing and dominating trade, perhaps carrying most of it. That was simply not the case before the eighteenth century, a kind of transitional century into the “European Age” that was to come, even though the Dutch and English of the early seventeenth century did come to dominate the spice trade to Europe so effectively that spice caravans to the Mediterranean virtually disappeared. But the overland caravans on these and other routes still ran. They simply carried different goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European voyages around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Atlantic brought revolutionary changes in world history, but the full consequences were slow to appear. European shipping, like other European technology, had developed remarkably during the Middle Ages, but it was not yet vastly superior to Asian shipping. It was not yet what it was to become when industrial power made Europe the unquestioned world leader. Europeans of the sixteenth century were much stronger than they had been in military and naval power, but they were not dominant. The European “maritime revolution” of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not so much a revolution in ship design as the discovery of the world wind system. Prevailing winds vary with latitude in the Atlantic, Pacific, and the southern Indian Ocean. Strong and regular trade winds blow from the east over about twenty degrees north and south of the equator – from the northeast north of the line, from the southeast south of the line. Still farther north or south, from about forty to sixty degrees north or south, the prevailing winds are from the west. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Portuguese mariners had discovered this pattern off the Saharan coast of Africa. They learned to sail south with the northeast trades and then, on the return, to make a long tack to the north-northwest sailing as close as they could to the prevailing northeasterly winds. In time, this would bring them to the westerlies in the vicinity of the Azores. Columbus had sailed down the African coast before he considered crossing the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]