ABSTRACT
Western expansion was, of course, driven by a ruthless search for profit and was supported by a growing political and technological sophistication. But uneven economic growth and political instability within the Muslim empires and the seaboard fringes of Asia also created pressures and opportunities which encouraged European nations and trading companies to seize political power in key regions before 1800. Seventeenth-century European observers tended to speak of the three great Muslim regimes in the same terms. The Muslim intelligentsia of this world was still linked by common assumptions and beliefs. The peoples of these vast regions, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, numbering over 200 million in 1700, were also tied together by celebrated trade routes and by common patterns of consumption, which ranked nobility and signified ethnicity across the whole civilisation. The impact of moderate population growth on the Muslim empires was complex.
