books.google.es - 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 we can see that the pre-imperial age was in fact more an 'age of partnership' or an 'age of competition'...http://books.google.es/books/about/The_Rise_of_Merchant_Empires.html?hl=es&id=heEdZziizrUC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareThe Rise of Merchant Empires
