What if the ancient Chinese junk fleet was never cancelled?

The Portuguese will still be able to trade, but they won`t be able to attempt to set up a monopoly, block access to certain ports and even the entire Red Sea. It was from this sort of thing that much of their Asian wealth was derived, they used the profits from this racket to buy the goods they sent home. Without this income Portugal was just another poverty-stricken country on the edge of Europe who can`t afford the things Aisa has to offer.

I think we're exaggerating a tad. A country that weak wouldn't have been able to do it with or without the Treasure Fleet - it's not as if everyone just raced to be the first to surrender when the Portugese sailed into sight.

Not to mention that the Red Sea doesn't seem to be a big deal to the Chinese.
 
I think the Chinese oceanic trade in the Indian Ocean, particularly it's large navy, might have made the Portuguese, Dutch, and English trade there non-starters after reading how they really started in Howard Erlichman's recent book "Conquest, Tribute, & Trade, the quest for precious metals and the birth of globalization". He goes into much greater detail about the piratical attacks that established the key trading posts for the Europeans in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Japan, etc., something other histories I'd read skipped over and made sound far more peaceful. The attacking forces were quite small and operating at or beyond feasible supply lines, without the series of safe bases for resupply, refitting, hull-scraping, etc. the Europeans' penetration in depth and scale would have been severely limited (think of coaling station islands in the 19th century shipping calculations.)

As to trading companies, I'd read somewhere that the Chinese trading dynasties in Hong Kong, Shanghai, along the Silk Road and major rivers, etc. went back hundreds of years if not longer. When you look at running trade ships, in any culture they are private ventures rather than government-owned ships even in Roman and Egyptian shipping. It's just too capital intensive to own and operate all those ships as well as the complexity is unappealing and much of the maritime trade will be foreigner-owned ships coming from other governments' ports.

Regulating and taxing trade are obviously far different activities, just like opening a new market, that are government done, while conducting millions of small trades is private business, even in a monarchy or dictatorship. But the more trade there is, as in a Chinese overseas empire well beyond the easy control of land-based bureaucrats, the more the private sector of trade, finance, and manufacturing would grow in China.

That would be a very big, albeit subtle POD over a couple of centuries just as it was in other countries' age of exploration followed by trade/finance/industrialization.

Business and trade history is viewed too much through the prism of government documents and policies, and was often too boring or too "trade secrets" to be written down in surviving documents for scholars to write especially dull doctoral theses from, even the business schools do very little business history (well further than a decade or so backwards.)
 
I think the Chinese oceanic trade in the Indian Ocean, particularly it's large navy, might have made the Portuguese, Dutch, and English trade there non-starters after reading how they really started in Howard Erlichman's recent book "Conquest, Tribute, & Trade, the quest for precious metals and the birth of globalization". He goes into much greater detail about the piratical attacks that established the key trading posts for the Europeans in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Japan, etc., something other histories I'd read skipped over and made sound far more peaceful. The attacking forces were quite small and operating at or beyond feasible supply lines, without the series of safe bases for resupply, refitting, hull-scraping, etc. the Europeans' penetration in depth and scale would have been severely limited (think of coaling station islands in the 19th century shipping calculations.)

And why is this going to be more true with the Treasure Fleets? What exactly are they doing that hinders these efforts in nonChinese areas?
 
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