Up to the end of the Middle Ages the world was divided into a number of almost self-contained regions which only made contact through strictly limited channels of trade. It is indeed possible to maintain, as Fritz Rörig has done in a brilliant article, that the medieval world already enjoyed a world-economy, for the spice trade and the silk trade, the voyages of the Norsemen and the explorations of the Arabs, even the wanderings of occasional travellers and missionaries, gave external contacts of varying importance. Nevertheless western Europe, the Near East, India and Indonesia, the Far East, to mention only the great and obvious divisions, each followed its own particular way of life.

Then, from the end of the fifteenth century onwards, contacts were increased and became more and more active, slowly helping to produce a single market for the whole world. Faced with new tasks, the European peoples who bordered on the Atlantic developed and applied new economic techniques. They changed the framework of their economic organization, created new methods of co-operative action and new state departments and above all new merchant companies. They improved their techniques and their methods of using capital, changing their methods by a new organization of property and by a re-introduction of slavery. The states intervened more directly in economic affairs and slowly created modern colonies; their methods, in general terms, became accepted as Mercantilism and eventually developed into modern capitalism.

From Medieval to Modern

Criticism has left little unchallenged of the once popular view that scientific and technological progress was conspicuously lacking from the Middle Ages. On the contrary it is now clear that the period after the twelfth century was one of rapid and fairly continuous development, surmounting even the great demographic and economic crisis of the Black Death. Intellectually, the rise of the universities furnished centres for the study of natural science based largely (but not exclusively) on the works of the ancient Greeks. Technologically, the employment of power derived from water and wind, the adoption of textile machinery and a more efficient metallurgy (vol. II, pp. 408–13, 458–69), together with the spread of more recent inventions such as the mechanical clock, the compass, and gunpowder gave promise of a new era in production, trade, and warfare. It may indeed be argued that it was still necessary to clear away most of the doctrines of late medieval science and medicine in order that modern ideas and methods should take their place, and to revolutionize the practices of the medieval craftsman in order that they should support a modern society. Nevertheless, in each case what had been achieved by the end of the fifteenth century was as superior to the standards prevailing in Charlemagne's time, as it was in turn inferior to the science and technology of the nineteenth century. Without this intermediate stage neither the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, nor the industrial revolution of the eighteenth, could have occurred.