ABSTRACT
The sixteenth century opens up a period, extending down to the present, in which the lands on the coasts of the North Atlantic have played a pivotal role in the power and trade picture of the Indian Ocean region. The devastating impact of the Mongols on Asia and Egypt, either through war or epidemic, facilitated the emergence of the Atlantic Europeans (whose wars and epidemics at the same time were eclipsed in scale by those in Asia and Egypt). The immediate beneficiary of this situation had been Renaissance Italy, but Italy was now replaced by the Iberian Peninsula thanks to the discovery of the fourth main sea route into the Indian Ocean. Other Atlantic peoples, notably Dutch and English (who played an important role in the Iberian success story from the first), and later Americans (tutored and helped by England), would follow.
