e trade, the Norwegian and
White Sea trade. So the Asiatic trade falls into certain tolerably
defined divisions of area, as the Levant trade, the Red Sea trade, the
Indian, the Straits, and East Indian, the China trade, etc. The whole
trade of the world is thus divided for commercial purposes.[117]
Though these trade divisions are primarily suggested by
considerations of transport rather than of the character of
production, the geographical, climatic, and other natural factors
which determine convenient lines of transport are found to have an
important bearing on the character of the production, and convenience
of transport itself assists largely to determine the kind of work
which each part of the world sets itself to do.

The establishment of a world-market for a larger and larger number of
commodities is transforming with marvellous rapidity the industrial
face of the globe. This does not now appear so plainly in the more
highly-developed countries of Europe, which, under the influence of
half a century's moderately free competition for a European market,
have already established themselves in tolerably settled conditions of
specialised industry. But in the new world, and in those older
countries which are now fast yielding to the incursions of
manufacturing and transport machinery, the specialising process is
making rapid strides.

Improved knowledge of the world, facile communication, an immense
increase in the fluidity of capital, and a considerable increase in
that of labour, are busily engaged in distributing the productions of
the world in accordance with certain dominant natural conditions.
Those industrial forces which have during the last century and a half
been operative in England, draining the population and industry from
the Southern and Eastern counties, and concentrating it in larger
proportions in Lancashire, the West Riding, Staffordshire, and round
the Northumbrian and South Wales coal-fields, specialising each town
or locality upon some single branch of the textile, metal, or other
industries for which its soil, position, or other natural advantages
made it suitable, are now beginning to extend the area of their
control over the whole surface of the known and inhabited globe.

As large areas of Asia, South and Central Africa, Australia, and South
America fall under the control of European commercial nations, are
opened up by steamships, railways, telegraphs, and are made free
receptacles for th