Roger Crowley

the health of the Chinese nation.

We see goods traveling in all sorts of directions.

We see the Chinese now exporting Ming China across the world.

We see all kinds of goods, ideas, images.

And a lot of this in Europe is...

expressed in the development of printing in the 16th century.

We start to see, I think, something like 150 million books were printed in the 16th century in Europe, probably more writing than ever been done in the whole of the world before.

And a lot of this was about exploration, about places.

And people could visualize the world in a different way.

You could have a globe.

You could see the world yourself.

You could have a pocket atlas of the world.

The world is my oyster, as Shakespeare said.

which I, with my sword, will open.

So we're seeing the development, I think, of the springboard of Europe's unfortunate, in many ways, launch across the world happening in this century.

It is absolutely fascinating.

And along with it go a whole range of other developments.

We see the development of cryptography, because people are trying to keep their information secret.

the Portuguese tried to redact as much of the material that they had written as possible.

Unfortunately, in this they failed because the Dutch managed to steal a map of all the trading routes to the Spice Islands and get there themselves, where they behaved far more brutally than the Portuguese and Spanish had.