Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/23

 A Study in Imperialism

Many a glowing tale has been told of the great Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century and of the consequent partial abandonment of the trans-Asiatic trade routes to India in favor of the newer routes by water around the Cape of Good Hope. It is sometimes overlooked, however, that a commercial revolution of the nineteenth century, occasioned by the adaptation of the steam engine to land and marine transportation, was of perhaps equal significance. Cheap carriage by the ocean greyhound instead of the stately clipper, by locomotive-drawn trains instead of stage-coach and caravan, made possible the extension of trade to the innermost and outermost parts of the earth and increased the volume of the world's commerce to undreamed of proportions. This latter commercial revolution led not only to the opening of new avenues of communication, but also to the regeneration of trade-routes which had been dormant or decayed for centuries. During the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth, the medieval trans-Asiatic highways to the East were rediscovered.

The first of these medieval trade-routes to be revived 1