>>50022952Bullshit, show me proof. That's a stupidly big point to make.
>>50022906We have a small industry, comes from us being too dependent on the agricultural incomes of brasil and the other colonies back then. So our major exports are raw materials, clothing and some machinery.
>>50023089Consider the fact that we once supplied pretty much all of Europe's spices.
Da Gama returned to Lisbon in October 1503, with 13 of his ships and nearly 1 700 tons of spices, i.e. about the same as annual Venetian imports from the Middle East at the end of the fifteenth century. However, the Portuguese margins on this trade were much bigger than the Venetian. Most of these spices were marketed in Europe via Antwerp, which was the chief port of the Spanish Netherlands.
A single fleet that wasn't prepared for large-scale merchantilism, m80
