Perhaps the greatest unintended consequence of the past millennium was Columbus’s accidental encounter with the Americas in 1492. The Genovese explorer was attempting to do what Vasco da Gama would achieve six years later: discover the sea route to Asia. The Portuguese explorer, rather than travelling west across the Atlantic, travelled south and then east and realised Columbus’s dream by establishing the nautical connection between Europe and the fabled Indies.
For the Europeans, the Indies had long been the source of essential spices that allowed them preserve food for winter, an advantage that meant they were a source of great wealth, even more so than the “incalculable amount of trade” Marco Polo suggested China offered.
Da Gama’s 1498 breakthrough was the beginning of the end of the Asian bazaar that was Venice: the lucrative land-based trade of the Eurasian Silk Road would henceforth increasingly come via the Indian and Atlantic oceans thus disintermediating those terrestrial caravanserais that had previously grown rich on that through traffic. The British and Dutch East Indies companies would, by cutting out Venetian and other middlemen, become the Amazon of their age . . . except that, unlike Amazon, they would become vastly profitable too!