It was already discernible in the sixteenth century when there began the long expansion of world commerce which was to last until 1930. It started by carrying further the shift of economic gravity from southern to northwestern Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Political troubles and wars such as ruined Italy made one contribution to this in the early sixteenth century. The great commercial success story of the sixteenth century was Antwerp's, though it collapsed after a few decades in political and economic disaster. In the seventeenth century Amsterdam and London surpassed it. In each case an important trade based on a well-populated country provided profits for diversification into manufacturing industry, services, and banking. .
Banks were the beginning of the increase in the use of paper, instead of bullion. In the eighteenth century came the first European paper currencies and the invention of the check. Joint stock companies generated another form of negotiable security, their own shares. By 1800 similar institutions existed in many countries. Throughout time the world was growing more commercial, more used to the idea of employing money to make money, and was supplying itself with the apparatus of modern capitalism. .
One effect quickly appeared in the much greater attention paid to commercial questions in diplomatic negotiation from the later seventeenth century and in the fact that countries were prepared to fight over them. The English and Dutch went to war over trade in 1652. This opened a long era during which the French and Spanish fought again and again over quarrels in which questions of trade were important. Governments not only looked after their merchants by going to war to uphold their interests, but also intervened in other ways in the working of the commercial economy. One advantage they could offer was monopoly privileges to a company under a charter; this made the raising of capital easier by offering some security for a return.
