economy: Europe 325 Their interest stemmed from periodic insecurities along the Silk Road caravan route across central Asia This resulted in regular market shortages that made China’s merchants unable to satisfy the Chinese aristocracy’s continuing demand for Western products or the Chinese government’s need for the substantial tax revenues it assessed on imports From 500 to 1000 Buddhism and Hinduism reinforced the enhanced India-China commercial network along the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean passageway, as evidenced by the archaeological remains of large temple complexes built in this era in Southeast Asia (modern-day Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar), southern India, Sri Lanka, and northeastern India In Southeast Asia trade-derived opportunities supported the rise of new political economies, including Sumatra-based Srivijaya, Champa and Vietnam on the Vietnam coastline, Angkor in Cambodia, Mataram in Java, Sri Lanka, post-Gupta (after 650) India (Bengal and southern India), and the Korean and Japanese imperial regimes Exchanges of metals, religious artifacts, ceramics, and exotic jungle products assumed new significance, in contrast to the earlier trade that was based in the exchanges of India’s textiles, pepper, and bronze artifacts for China’s silk, Middle Eastern incense, and Southeast Asia’s spices The volume of Indian Ocean trade surged in the 11th century thanks in part to the regional stability established over the Middle East by Muslim Abbasid caliphs (749–1258) and Seljuk Turks (1038–1194) Middle Eastern merchants took to the Indian Ocean to seek Asian goods in exchange for their own This, paired with a stable Chinese market, caused southern India and Sri Lanka to become new international commercial hubs, filling roles as strategic intermediaries in the trade between the Middle East and Southeast Asia In Southeast Asia, Java became prominent because of its central role in providing international access to the spices of the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, of Indonesia’s eastern archipelago By this time regional centers were working together as one great integrated Indian Ocean trade network The increased volume of trade attracted a multiethnic community of trade specialists that included Middle Easterners, Indians, Southeast Asians, and Chinese All the sojourning traders made seasonal voyages using the Asian monsoon winds, which blew from southwest to northeast from June through August and reversed to blow from northeast to southwest from December through March China’s Ming rulers supported the new Melaka emporium on the southwestern coast of the Malay Peninsula, which was empowered to maintain the security of the vital Strait of Malacca passageway Between 1405 and 1433 the eunuch admiral Zheng He and his fleet of Chinese battleships reinstated the Chinese tributary trade system, wherein Indian Ocean countries sent periodic embassies to China’s courts to present diplomatic “gifts” of their prize marketplace commodities in return for honorific material symbols and official proclamations that confirmed their local authority Partly in response to these Ming initiatives, Asia’s 15th-century trade volume substantially increased, as did the number of participants in Asia’s marketplaces and the diversity of traded commodities This prosperity attracted the attention of Europeans, whose desire to acquire Asia’s exotic commodities resulted in Europe’s 16th-century Age of Discovery Europe by Kirk H Beetz When the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire abdicated in 476, the economy of the region was in decline During the 400s the populations of European towns and cities decreased Even the city of Rome itself, which once had more than a million residents, saw its population dwindle to a quarter of a million The fundamental problem was that the rural economy could not support the urban economy People in the cities, unable to get enough food from local farms, often had to flee their homes to the countryside During the sixth century the situation worsened The wars of the Germanic peoples further disrupted trade, often destroying the routes that had brought food and other goods into cities Urbanites who fled to the countryside typically did not farm effectively and eventually perished Those who succeeded in staving off catastrophe barely grew enough to feed themselves For roughly 400 years Europe was mired in a subsistence economy, in which people grew barely enough food to keep themselves alive Very little was left over for sale to others During the sixth and seventh centuries the populations of European cities outside Italy and the Byzantine Empire declined so that no city or town had more than 10,000 residents Some historians argue that this was true for Italy too, but other historians believe that Rome retained a population of about 20,000 Italy had the advantage of being in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, with access to some of the wealth available from trade routes heading west, east, and south across the water The European economy saw its first period of growth during the eighth century in the north and west, when cities like Ipswich in England and Dorestad in the Netherlands were home to international trade That growth was sustained in the ninth century during the reigns of the Carolingian kings, especially Charlemagne (r 768–814), who tried to standardize European coinage and encourage trade Around 900 the European economy began to grow because new technology made farming more productive and trade routes were open-