This chapter discusses Portuguese policies and Indian reactions concerning the horse trade, general trade control, and technology. The Portuguese arrival in the Indian Ocean meant that for perhaps fifty years the trade through the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and so to Venice suffered greatly, though not consistently. Even in the first decade of the sixteenth century over half of Portugal's state revenue came from West African gold and Asian pepper and other spices. A problem as important as mismanagement in Lisbon was the revival of the Levant trade, for this eroded Portugal's early sixteenth-century quasi-monopoly position. Apparently later in the century some of the Christians were persuaded to bring the pepper themselves, but at least for the first part of the century the Portuguese were usually dependent for their pepper supplies on their supposed inveterate enemies, the Muslims.

This chapter discusses significant developments, which occurred in the pattern of trade in early medieval centuries in the expansion of maritime activity in the eastern waters of the Indian Ocean and the China Sea. The presence of Indian traders, and of Indian men of religion as a civilizing force, led not only to a shared common culture, but also an expansion of the textile trade towards the growing markets, to developments of shipbuilding in southern and eastern India, and the entry of Indian merchants into direct trading with China. By 1200 commodities of the maritime trade were mainly carried in two types of vessel, evolved at the eastern and western ends of the trade, and plying almost exclusively within their particular sectors, the dhow and the junk. The expansion of Muslim maritime influence was a process independent of the encroachment on south Asia of Muslim arms, and the great Muslim expansion of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.