Why Europe Went to Sea

Motives and means

The motives are usually summarised as God, gold and glory, but the precise economic driver matters: European states wanted direct access to Asian spice markets, cutting out the Ottoman and Venetian middlemen who controlled the eastern Mediterranean routes.

The means were largely borrowed. The compass and gunpowder came from China; the lateen sail and astrolabe from the Islamic world; and the caravel combined these into a ship that could sail against the wind and carry cannon.

State backing mattered as much as technology. Portugal and Spain funded voyages directly; England and the Netherlands used joint-stock companies — the VOC and the English East India Company — which pooled private capital and spread risk across many investors, allowing sustained investment that no single merchant could finance.

Two different empires

• Portuguese — a trading-post empire. They did not try to conquer territory in Asia; they seized key ports and choke points to tax existing trade. Cheap to run, but it depended on naval superiority alone.
• Spanish — territorial conquest in the Americas, made possible by epidemic disease, indigenous allies, and the capture of existing tribute systems. The encomienda and later the hacienda organised forced labour, and the Potosí silver mines financed the Spanish state.

Note the general point: Europeans did not dominate Asian trade in this period. In the Indian Ocean they were one armed participant among many; their decisive advantage appeared only in the Americas, and it came largely from disease.