[netcan]

I agree that the story is totally different from the other end, and that non-trade things like slavery, war, colonisations and other atrocities committed by the empires and companies preceding them are salient.

I was simply commenting on the trade. What made them different was, in some sense, macroeconomic. By bringing goods home, these trade empires were generating feedback loops. Gold wealth (or share wealth, as is relevant in this context) was spent on goods, in a process that created more of it... Not more of it in the world, necessarily. More of it in London and Amsterdam.

As you say, europe had been importing asian luxury goods since forever. The trade routes were old before Rome was young, as they say.

At the end there, are you implying something salient about the current HK crisis?