title: Tristan und Isolde

text: The lovers, at last alone and freed from the constraints of courtly life, declare their passion for each other. Tristan decries the realm of daylight which is false, unreal, and keeps them apart. It is only in night, he claims, that they can truly be together and only in the long night of death can they be eternally united ("O sink' hernieder, Nacht der Liebe"). During their long tryst, Brangäne calls a warning several times that the night is ending ("Einsam wachend in der Nacht"), but her cries fall upon deaf ears. The day breaks in on the lovers as Melot leads King Marke and his men to find Tristan and Isolde in each other's arms. Marke is heartbroken, not only because of his nephew's betrayal but also because Melot chose to betray his friend Tristan to Marke and because of Isolde's betrayal as well ("Mir – dies? Dies, Tristan – mir?").


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: When questioned, Tristan says he cannot answer to the King the reason of his betrayal since he would not understand. He turns to Isolde, who agrees to follow him again into the realm of night. Tristan announces that Melot has fallen in love with Isolde too. Melot and Tristan fight, but, at the crucial moment, Tristan throws his sword aside and allows Melot to stab him.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Kurwenal has brought Tristan home to his castle at Kareol in Brittany. A shepherd pipes a mournful tune and asks if Tristan is awake. Kurwenal replies that only Isolde's arrival can save Tristan, and the shepherd offers to keep watch and claims that he will pipe a joyful tune to mark the arrival of any ship. Tristan awakes ("Die alte Weise – was weckt sie mich?") and laments his fate – to be, once again, in the false realm of daylight, once more driven by unceasing unquenchable yearning ("Wo ich erwacht' weilt ich nicht"). Tristan's sorrow ends when Kurwenal tells him that Isolde is on her way. Tristan, overjoyed, asks if her ship is in sight, but only a sorrowful tune from the shepherd's pipe is heard.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Tristan relapses and recalls that the shepherd's mournful tune is the same as was played when he was told of the deaths of his father and mother ("Muss ich dich so versteh'n, du alte, ernst Weise"). He rails once again against his desires and against the fateful love potion ("verflucht sei, furchtbarer Trank!") until, exhausted, he collapses in delirium. After his collapse, the shepherd is heard piping the arrival of Isolde's ship, and, as Kurwenal rushes to meet her, Tristan tears the bandages from his wounds in his excitement ("Hahei! Mein Blut, lustig nun fliesse!"). As Isolde arrives at his side, Tristan dies with her name on his lips.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Isolde collapses beside her deceased lover just as the appearance of another ship is announced. Kurwenal spies Melot, Marke and Brangäne arriving ("Tod und Hölle! Alles zur Hand!"). He believes they have come to kill Tristan and, in an attempt to avenge him, furiously attacks Melot. Marke tries to stop the fight to no avail. Both Melot and Kurwenal are killed in the fight. Marke and Brangäne finally reach Tristan and Isolde. Marke, grieving over the body of his "truest friend" ("Tot denn alles!"), explains that Brangäne revealed the secret of the love potion and that he had come not to part the lovers, but to unite them ("Warum Isolde, warum mir das?"). Isolde appears to wake at this and in a final aria describing her vision of Tristan risen again (the "Liebestod", "love death"), dies ("Mild und leise wie er lächelt").


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Wagner's friend the poet Georg Herwegh introduced him in late 1854 to the work of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The composer was immediately struck by the philosophical ideas to be found in "The World as Will and Representation" ("Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung"), and the similarities between the two men's world-views became clear.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Man, according to Schopenhauer, is driven by continued, unachievable desires, and the gulf between our desires and the possibility of achieving them leads to misery while the world is a representation of an unknowable reality. Our representation of the world is Phenomenon, while the unknowable reality is Noumenon: concepts originally posited by Kant. Schopenhauer's influence on "Tristan und Isolde" is most evident in the second and third acts. The second act, in which the lovers meet, and the third act, during which Tristan longs for release from the passions that torment him, have often proved puzzling to opera-goers unfamiliar with Schopenhauer's work.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Wagner uses the metaphor of Day and Night in the second act to designate the realms inhabited by Tristan and Isolde. The world of Day is one in which the lovers are bound by the dictates of King Marke's court and in which the lovers must smother their mutual love and pretend as if they do not care for each other: it is a realm of falsehood and unreality. Under the dictates of the realm of Day, Tristan was forced to remove Isolde from Ireland and to marry her to his Uncle Marke – actions against Tristan's secret desires. The realm of Night, in contrast, is the representation of intrinsic reality, in which the lovers can be together and their desires can be openly expressed and reach fulfilment: it is the realm of oneness, truth and reality and can only be achieved fully upon the deaths of the lovers. The realm of Night, therefore, becomes also the realm of death: the only world in which Tristan and Isolde can be as one forever, and it is this realm that Tristan speaks of at the end of Act II ("Dem Land das Tristan meint, der Sonne Licht nicht scheint"). In Act III, Tristan rages against the daylight and frequently cries out for release from his desires (Sehnen). In this way, Wagner implicitly equates the realm of Day with Schopenhauer's concept of Phenomenon and the realm of Night with Schopenhauer's concept of Noumenon. While none of this is explicitly stated in the libretto, Tristan's comments on Day and Night in Acts II and III, as well as musical allusions to "Tristan" in "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" and "Parsifal" make it very clear that this was, in fact, Wagner's intention.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: The world-view of Schopenhauer dictates that the only way for man to achieve inner peace is to renounce his desires: a theme that Wagner explored fully in his last opera, "Parsifal". In fact Wagner even considered having the character of Parsifal meet Tristan during his sufferings in Act III, but later rejected the idea.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Klaas A. Posthuma argues that neither Tristan nor Isolde tries for one moment to ignore feelings of love for the other or to overcome them. On the contrary, they yield to their feelings with all their hearts – but secretly. Such behavior has nothing whatever to do with Schopenhauer's claim. Another important point in Schopenhauer's philosophy is his view that happiness cannot be found with one woman only – his reason for never marrying. But for Tristan there is only one woman, Isolde, with Death as alternative. And this leads to the inevitable conclusion that it was not Schopenhauer and his doctrine that were responsible for creating of Wagner's sublime music drama but his own unfulfilled longing for the woman he met and loved during these years, Mathilde Wesendonck.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Although "Tristan und Isolde" is now widely performed in major opera houses around the world, critical opinion of the opera was initially unfavourable. The 5 July 1865 edition of the "Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung" reported:


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Eduard Hanslick's reaction in 1868 to the prelude to "Tristan" was that it "reminds one of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel." The first performance in London's Drury Lane Theatre drew the following response from "The Era" in 1882:


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Mark Twain, on a visit to Germany, heard "Tristan" at Bayreuth and commented: "I know of some, and have heard of many, who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the one sane person in the community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven."


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Clara Schumann wrote that "Tristan und Isolde" was "the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in all my life".


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: With the passage of time, "Tristan" became more favourably regarded. In an interview shortly before his death, Giuseppe Verdi said that he "stood in wonder and terror" before Wagner's "Tristan". In "", writer and satirist George Bernard Shaw writes that "Tristan" was "an astonishingly intense and faithful translation into music of the emotions which accompany the union of a pair of lovers" and described it as "a poem of destruction and death". Richard Strauss, initially dismissive of "Tristan," claimed that Wagner's music "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords." Later, however, Strauss became part of the Bayreuth coterie and writing to Cosima Wagner in 1892 declared: "I have conducted my first "Tristan". It was the most wonderful day of my life." In 1935 he wrote to Joseph Gregor, one of his librettists, that "Tristan und Isolde" was "the end of all romanticism, as it brings into focus the longing of the entire 19th century."


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Arnold Schoenberg referred to Wagner's technique of shifting chords in "Tristan" as "phenomena of incredible adaptability and nonindependence roaming, homeless, among the spheres of keys; spies reconnoitering weaknesses; to exploit them in order to create confusion, deserters for whom surrender of their own personality is an end in itself".


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Friedrich Nietzsche, who in his younger years was one of Wagner's staunchest allies, wrote that, for him, ""Tristan and Isolde" is the real "opus metaphysicum" of all art ... insatiable and sweet craving for the secrets of night and death ... it is overpowering in its simple grandeur". In a letter to his friend Erwin Rohde in October 1868, Nietzsche described his reaction to "Tristan's" prelude: "I simply cannot bring myself to remain critically aloof from this music; every nerve in me is atwitch, and it has been a long time since I had such a lasting sense of ecstasy as with this overture". Even after his break with Wagner, Nietzsche continued to consider "Tristan" a masterpiece: "Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as "Tristan" – I have sought in vain, in every art."


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Marcel Proust, greatly influenced by Wagner, refers to "Tristan und Isolde" and its "inexhaustible repetitions" throughout his novel "In Search of Lost Time". He describes the prelude theme as "linked to the future, to the reality of the human soul, of which it was one of the most special and distinctive ornaments."


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: "Tristan und Isolde" has a long recorded history and most of the major Wagner conductors since the end of the First World War have had their interpretations captured on disc. The limitations of recording technology meant that until the 1930s it was difficult to record the entire opera, however recordings of excerpts or single acts exist going back to 1901, when excerpts of Tristan were captured on the Mapleson Cylinders recorded during performances at the Metropolitan Opera.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: In the years before World War II, Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior were considered to be the prime interpreters of the lead roles, and mono recordings exist of this pair in a number of live performances led by conductors such as Thomas Beecham, Fritz Reiner, Artur Bodanzky and Erich Leinsdorf. Flagstad recorded the part commercially only near the end of her career in 1952, under Wilhelm Furtwängler for EMI, producing a set which is considered a classic recording.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Following the war, another classic recording is the 1952 performance at the Bayreuth Festival with Martha Mödl and Ramón Vinay under Herbert von Karajan, which is noted for its strong, vivid characterizations and is now available as a live recording. In the 1960s, the soprano Birgit Nilsson was considered the major Isolde interpreter, and she was often partnered with the Tristan of Wolfgang Windgassen. Their performance at Bayreuth in 1966 under the baton of Karl Böhm was captured by Deutsche Grammophon – a performance often hailed as one of the best "Tristan" recordings.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Karajan did not record the opera officially until 1971–72. Karajan's selection of a lighter soprano voice (Helga Dernesch) as Isolde, paired with an extremely intense Jon Vickers and the unusual balance between orchestra and singers favoured by Karajan was controversial. In the 1980s recordings by conductors such as Carlos Kleiber, Reginald Goodall, and Leonard Bernstein were mostly considered to be important for the interpretation of the conductor, rather than that of the lead performers. The set by Kleiber is notable as Isolde was sung by the famous Mozartian soprano Margaret Price, who never sang the role of Isolde on stage. The same is true for Plácido Domingo, who sang the role of Tristan to critical acclaim in the 2005 EMI release under the baton of Antonio Pappano despite never having sung the role on stage. In the last ten years acclaimed sets include a studio recording with the Berlin Philharmonic by Daniel Barenboim and a live set from the Vienna Staatsoper led by Christian Thielemann.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: There are several DVD productions of the opera including Götz Friedrich's production at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin featuring the seasoned Wagnerians René Kollo and Dame Gwyneth Jones in the title roles. Deutsche Grammophon released a DVD of a Metropolitan Opera performance featuring Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner, conducted by James Levine, in a production staged by Dieter Dorn and a DVD of the 1993 Bayreuth Festival production with conductor Daniel Barenboim and featuring Waltraud Meier as Isolde and Siegfried Jerusalem as Tristan, staged by Heiner Müller. More recently Barenboim's production at La Scala, Milan, in the production by Patrice Chéreau has also been issued on DVD. There is also a technically flawed, but historically important video recording with Birgit Nilsson and Jon Vickers from a 1973 live performance at the Théâtre antique d'Orange, conducted by Karl Böhm.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: In a world first, the British opera house Glyndebourne made a full digital video download of the opera available for purchase online in 2009. The performance stars Robert Gambill as Tristan, Nina Stemme as Isolde, Katarina Karnéus as Brangäne, Bo Skovhus as Kurwenal, René Pape as King Marke, and Stephen Gadd as Melot, with Jiří Bělohlávek as the conductor, and was recorded on 1 and 6 August 2007.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: The "Prelude and Liebestod" is a concert version of the overture and Isolde's Act III aria, "Mild und leise". The arrangement was by Wagner himself, and it was first performed in 1862, several years before the premiere of the complete opera in 1865. The "Liebestod" can be performed either in a purely orchestral version, or with a soprano singing Isolde's vision of Tristan resurrected.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: However, the very first time the prelude and its opening "Tristan chord" was heard publicly was on 12 March 1859, when it was performed at the Sophieninselsaal in Prague, in a charity concert in aid of poor medical students, conducted by Hans von Bülow, who provided his own concert ending for the occasion. Wagner had authorised such an ending, but did not like what Bülow had done with it and later wrote his own. Wagner then included the prelude in his own three concerts at the Paris Théâtre-Italien in January–February 1860.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Wagner called the prelude the "Liebestod" (Love-death) while Isolde's final aria "Mild und leise" he called the "Verklärung" (Transfiguration). In 1867 his father-in-law Franz Liszt made a piano transcription of "Mild und leise", which he called "Liebestod" (S.447); he prefaced his score with a four-bar motto from the love duet from Act II, which in the opera is sung to the words "sehnend verlangter Liebestod". Liszt's transcription became well known throughout Europe well before Wagner's opera reached most places, and it is Liszt's title for the final scene that persists. The transcription was revised in 1875.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Wagner wrote a concert ending for the Act II Love Duet for a planned 1862 concert performance that did not eventuate. The music was lost until 1950, then passed into private hands, before coming to the attention of Daniel Barenboim, who passed it on to Sir Antonio Pappano. The first recording of the Love Duet with the concert ending was made in 2000, with Plácido Domingo, Deborah Voigt and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under Pappano.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Another composer to rework material from "Tristan" was Emmanuel Chabrier in his humorous "Souvenirs de Munich – quadrilles on themes from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde". These were augmented and orchestrated by Markus Lehmann in 1988. Leopold Stokowski made a series of purely orchestral "Symphonic Syntheses" of Wagner's operas during his time as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, bringing to concert audiences of the 1920s and '30s music they might not otherwise have heard. He made a 'long version' of music from "Tristan and Isolde" which consisted mainly of the Act I prelude, the from Act II and the from Act III. A shorter version of music from the 2nd and 3rd acts was called "Love Music from "Tristan and Isolde"". He made recordings of both versions on 78s and again on LP.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: The British composer Ronald Stevenson has made two arrangements based on the opera. The first is "The Fugue on the Shepherd's Air from Tristan und Isolde" from 1999. Its composition was inspired by a lecture given by the Wagner biographer and chair of the Wagner Society of Scotland, Derek Watson, to whom the piece is dedicated. In a contrapuntal climax, Stevenson combines both the Shepherd's Air and Isolde's Liebestod. The second is a setting, for voices and organ, of lines from Tom Hubbard's 1998 narrative poem in Scots, 'Isolde's Luve-Daith', the premiere of which took place in Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh in March 2003.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: Aubrey Beardsley's pen and ink drawing "The Wagnerites" shows highly coiffured men and women attending a performance of "Tristan und Isolde". The drawing was first published in the Yellow Book, vol III [October 1894]. According to Stephen Calloway, 'Beardsley had an obsessive interest in Wagner, and avidly attended the London performances of the works. This depiction of the Wagnerian audience rather than the action of the opera identified by the fallen programme as Tristan and Isolde, is one of the greatest masterpieces of Beardsley's manière noire. Sickert claimed to have warned him that the drawings in which the area of black exceeded that of white paper were bound to fail artistically, and to have 'convinced him' of the truth of this aesthetic rule. Fortunately Beardsley seems to have ignored the advice.' The drawing is in the collection of The Victoria and Albert Museum.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: The following year Beardsley produced a print depicting a stylised image of a woman, standing in front of a half length yellow curtain, wearing an ornate flowered hat and holding a large drinking vessel to her mouth. In the bottom right-hand corner is the word ISOLDE. "Isolde" was first reproduced in colour lithography (red, green, grey and black) as a supplement to The Studio, October 1895. The drawing (in yellow, black and white) is in the collection of The Victoria and Albert Museum.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: The opera forms the backdrop of Horacio Quiroga's tale of love lost, (The Death of Isolde) from his collection "" (1917).


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: In Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film "The Birds", a recording of "Tristan" is prominently displayed in the scene in which Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) resignedly reveals to Melanie (Tippi Hedren) her unrequited love for Mitch. For Camille Paglia, the visual inclusion of the LP cover, with the opera's 'theme of self-immolation through doomed love' signifies that Annie is a forlorn romantic.


title: Tristan und Isolde

text: The famous Liebestod is used in the soundtrack of the third episode of the first season of The Crown.


title: Macrinus

text: Marcus Opellius Macrinus (; – June 218) was Roman emperor from April 217 to June 218, reigning jointly with his young son Diadumenianus. As a member of the equestrian class, he became the first emperor who did not hail from the senatorial class and also the first emperor who never visited Rome during his reign. Before becoming emperor, Macrinus served under Emperor Caracalla as a praetorian prefect and dealt with Rome's civil affairs. He later conspired against Caracalla and had him murdered in a bid to protect his own life, succeeding him as emperor.


title: Macrinus

text: Macrinus was proclaimed emperor of Rome by 11 April 217 while in the eastern provinces of the empire and was subsequently confirmed as such by the Senate; however, for the duration of his reign, he never had the opportunity to return to Rome. His predecessor's policies had left Rome's coffers empty and the empire at war with several kingdoms, including Parthia, Armenia and Dacia. As emperor, Macrinus first attempted to enact reform to bring economic and diplomatic stability to Rome. While Macrinus' diplomatic actions brought about peace with each of the individual kingdoms, the additional monetary costs and subsequent fiscal reforms generated unrest in the Roman military.


title: Macrinus

text: Caracalla's aunt Julia Maesa took advantage of the unrest and instigated a rebellion to have her fourteen-year-old grandson, Elagabalus, recognized as emperor. Macrinus was overthrown at the Battle of Antioch on 8 June 218 and Elagabalus proclaimed himself emperor with support from the rebelling Roman legions. Macrinus fled the battlefield and tried to reach Rome, but was captured in Chalcedon and later executed in Cappadocia. He sent his son to the care of Artabanus IV of Parthia, but Diadumenian was also captured before he could reach his destination and executed. After Macrinus' death, the Senate declared him and his son enemies of Rome and had their names struck from the records and their images destroyed; the phrase for such a drastic social/historical erasure came to be "damnatio memoriae": damnation (of the) memory (of someone).


title: Macrinus

text: Macrinus was born in Caesarea (modern Cherchell, Algeria) in the Roman province of Mauretania Caesariensis to an equestrian family of Berber origins. According to David Potter, his family traced its origins to the Berber tribes of the region and his pierced ear was an indication of his Berber heritage. He received an education which allowed him to ascend to the Roman political class. Over the years, he earned a reputation as a skilled lawyer; and, under Emperor Septimius Severus, he became an important bureaucrat. Severus' successor Caracalla later appointed him a prefect of the Praetorian Guard.


title: Macrinus

text: While Macrinus probably enjoyed the trust of Emperor Caracalla, this may have changed when, according to tradition, it was prophesied that he would depose and succeed the emperor. Macrinus, fearing for his safety, resolved to have Caracalla murdered before he was condemned.


title: Macrinus

text: In the spring of 217, Caracalla was in the eastern provinces preparing a campaign against the Parthian Empire. Macrinus was among his staff, as were other members of the Praetorian Guard. In April, Caracalla went to visit a temple of Luna near the site of the battle of Carrhae and was accompanied only by his personal guard, which included Macrinus. On 8 April, while travelling to the temple, Caracalla was stabbed to death by Justin Martialis, a soldier whom Macrinus had recruited to commit the murder. In the aftermath, Martialis was killed by one of Caracalla's men.


title: Macrinus

text: For two or three days, Rome remained without an emperor. On 11 April, Macrinus proclaimed himself emperor and assumed all of the imperial titles and powers, without waiting for the Senate. The army backed his claim as emperor and the Senate, so far away, was powerless to intervene. Macrinus never returned to Rome as emperor and remained based in Antioch for the duration of his reign. Macrinus was the first emperor to hail from the equestrian class, rather than the senatorial and also the first emperor of Mauretanian descent. He adopted the name of Severus, in honour of the Severan dynasty, and conferred the imperial title of Augusta to his wife Nonia Celsa and the title of Caesar and name of Antoninus to his son Diadumenianus in honour of the Antonine dynasty, thus making him second in command. At the time of Diadumenian's accession he was eight years old.


title: Macrinus

text: Despite his equestrian background, Macrinus was accepted by the Senate for two reasons: for the removal of Caracalla, and for having received the loyalty of the army. The senators were less concerned by Macrinus' Mauretanian ancestry than by his equestrian social background and scrutinized his actions as emperor. Their opinion of him was reduced by his decisions to appoint to high offices men who were of similarly undistinguished background. Only the Senate had the constitutional power to choose the emperor from among the senators and Macrinus, not being a senator and having become emperor through force rather than through traditional means, was looked down upon.


title: Macrinus

text: Macrinus had several issues that he needed to deal with at the time of his accession, which had been left behind by his predecessor. As Caracalla had a tendency towards military belligerence, rather than diplomacy, this left several conflicts for Macrinus to resolve. Additionally, Caracalla had been a profligate spender of Rome's income. Most of the money was spent on the army; he had greatly increased their pay from 2,000 sesterces to 3,000 sesterces per year. The increased expenditures forced Caracalla to strip bare whatever sources of income he had to supply the difference. This shortfall left Rome in a dire fiscal situation that Macrinus needed to address.


title: Macrinus

text: Macrinus was at first occupied by the threat of the Parthians, with whom Rome had been at war since the reign of Caracalla. Macrinus settled a peace deal with the Parthians after fighting an indecisive battle at Nisibis in 217. In return for peace, Macrinus was forced to pay a large indemnity to the Parthian ruler Artabanus IV. Rome was at the time also under threat from Dacia and Armenia, so any deal with Parthia would likely have been beneficial to Rome. Next, Macrinus turned his attention to Armenia. In 216, Caracalla had imprisoned Khosrov I of Armenia and his family after Khosrov had agreed to meet with Caracalla at a conference to discuss some issue between himself and his sons. Caracalla instead installed a new Roman governor to rule over Armenia. These actions angered the Armenian people and they soon rebelled against Rome. Macrinus settled a peace treaty with them by returning the crown and loot to Khosrov's son and successor Tiridates II and releasing his mother from prison, and by restoring Armenia to its status as a client kingdom of Rome. Macrinus made peace with the Dacians by releasing hostages, though this was likely not handled by himself but by Marcius Agrippa. In matters of foreign policy, Macrinus showed a tendency towards settling disputes through diplomacy and a reluctance to engage in military conflict, though this may have been due more to the lack of resources and manpower than to his own personal preference.


title: Macrinus

text: Macrinus began to overturn Caracalla's fiscal policies and moved closer towards those that had been set forth by Septimius Severus. One such policy change involved the pay of Roman legionaries. The soldiers that were already enlisted during Caracalla's reign enjoyed exorbitant payments which were impossible for Macrinus to reduce without risking a potential rebellion. Instead, Macrinus allowed the enlisted soldiers to retain their higher payments, but he reduced the pay of new recruits to the level which had been set by Severus. Macrinus revalued the Roman currency, increasing the silver purity and weight of the denarius from 50.78 percent and 1.66 grams at the end of Caracalla's reign to 57.85 percent and 1.82 grams from Autumn 217 to the end of his reign, so that it mirrored Severus' fiscal policy for the period 197 to 209. Macrinus' goal with these policies might have been to return Rome to the relative economic stability that had been enjoyed under Severus' reign, though it came with a cost. The fiscal changes that Macrinus enacted might have been tenable had it not been for the military. By this time, the strength of the military was too great and by enacting his reforms he angered the veteran soldiers, who viewed his actions in reducing the pay of new recruits as a foreshadowing of eventual reductions in their own privileges and pay. This significantly reduced Macrinus' popularity with the legions that had declared him emperor.


title: Macrinus

text: Caracalla's mother Julia Domna was initially left in peace when Macrinus became emperor. This changed when Macrinus discovered that she was conspiring against him and had her placed under house arrest in Antioch. By this time Julia Domna was suffering from an advanced stage of breast cancer and soon died in Antioch. Afterwards, Macrinus sent Domna's sister Julia Maesa and her children back to Emesa in Syria, from where Maesa set in motion her plans to have Macrinus overthrown. Macrinus remained in Antioch instead of going to Rome upon being declared emperor, a step which furthered his unpopularity in Rome and contributed to his eventual downfall.


title: Macrinus

text: Julia Maesa had retired to her home town of Emesa with an immense fortune, which she had accrued over the course of twenty years. She took her children, Julia Soaemias and Julia Mamaea, and grandchildren, including Elagabalus, with her to Emesa. Elagabalus, aged 14, was the chief priest of the Phoenician sun-deity Elagabalus (or El-Gabal) in Emesa. Soldiers from Legio III "Gallica" (Gallic Third Legion), that had been stationed at the nearby camp of Raphanea, often visited Emesa and went to see Elagabalus perform his priestly rituals and duties while there. Julia Maesa took advantage of this, to suggest to the soldiers that Elagabalus was indeed the illegitimate son of Caracalla. On 16 May, Elagabalus was proclaimed emperor by the Legio III "Gallica" at its camp at Raphanea. Upon Elagabalus' revolt, Macrinus travelled to Apamea and conferred the title of Augustus onto his son, Diadumenianus, and made him co-emperor.


title: Macrinus

text: Macrinus realised that his life was in danger but struggled to decide upon a course of action and remained at Antioch. He sent a force of cavalry commanded by Ulpius Julianus to regain control of the rebels, but they failed and Ulpius died in the attempt. This failure further strengthened Elagabalus' army. Soon after, a force under Elagabalus' tutor Gannys marched on Antioch and engaged Macrinus' army on 8 June 218 near the village of Immae, located approximately 24 miles from Antioch. At some point during the ensuing Battle of Antioch, Macrinus deserted the field and returned to Antioch. He was then forced to flee from Antioch as fighting erupted in the city as well. Elagabalus himself subsequently entered Antioch as the new ruler of the Roman Empire. Macrinus fled for Rome; he travelled as far as Chalcedon before being recognized and captured. His son and co-emperor Diadumenianus, sent to the care of Artabanus IV of Parthia, was himself captured in transit at Zeugma and killed in June 218. Diadumenianus' reign lasted a total of 14 months, and he was about 10 years old when he died. Macrinus, upon learning of his son's death, tried to escape captivity, but he injured himself in the unsuccessful attempt and was afterward executed in Cappadocia; his head was sent to Elagabalus. Much like Macrinus, Diadumenianus' head was also cut off and sent to Elagabalus as a trophy.


title: Macrinus

text: Macrinus and his son Diadumenian were declared "hostes", enemies of the state, by the Senate immediately after news had arrived of their deaths and as part of an official declaration of support for the usurper Elagabalus, who was recognized in the Senate as the new Emperor. The declaration of "hostes" led to two actions being taken against the images of the former Emperors. First, their portraits were destroyed and their names were stricken from inscriptions and papyri. The second action, taken by the Roman soldiers who had rebelled against Macrinus in favour of Elagabalus, was to destroy all of the works and possessions of Macrinus. The "damnatio memoriae" against Macrinus is among the earliest of such sanctions enacted by the Senate. Many of the marble busts of Macrinus that exist were defaced and mutilated as a response to the "damnatio memoriae" and many of the coins depicting Macrinus and Diadumenianus were also destroyed. These actions against Macrinus are evidence of his unpopularity in Rome.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Lifeforce is a 1985 science fiction horror film directed by Tobe Hooper, adapted by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby, and starring Steve Railsback, Peter Firth, Frank Finlay, Mathilda May, and Patrick Stewart. Based on Colin Wilson's 1976 novel "The Space Vampires", the film portrays the events that unfold after a trio of humanoids in a state of suspended animation are brought to Earth after being discovered in the hold of an alien space ship by the crew of a European Space Shuttle.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The film received negative reviews on release and was a box office failure, but has since become a cult film.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The crew of the joint British and American Space Shuttle "Churchill", under the command of Colonel Tom Carlsen, finds a spaceship hidden in the coma of Halley's Comet. Inside, the crew discovers hundreds of desiccated bat-like creatures and three naked humanoid bodies (two male and one female) in suspended animation within glass containers. The crew recovers a bat-alien and the three bodies and begins the return trip to Earth. However, during the return journey, mission control loses contact with "Churchill". A rescue mission is launched to investigate.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The rescuers discover that "Churchill" has been gutted by fire. The present crew are dead, and the escape pod is missing, yet the three containers bearing the bodies remain intact. The bodies are taken to the European Space Research Centre in London. Prior to an autopsy, the female alien awakens and drains the life force out of a guard. She then escapes the facility and proceeds to drain other humans of their life force. The two male vampires awaken and attempt a violent escape, but they are apparently destroyed by grenades thrown by the guards. Soon after, the guard revives two hours after his death and also displays the ability to drain others of their life force.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Meanwhile, in Texas, an escape pod from "Churchill" is found with Carlsen inside. Carlsen is flown to London, where he describes the course of events, including feeling compelled to open the female vampire's container and share his life force with her, culminating in the draining of the "Churchill" crew's life force. Carlsen explains that he set fire to the shuttle with the intention of saving Earth from the same fate and escaped in the pod. However, when he is hypnotised, it becomes clear that Carlsen possesses a psychic link to the female alien, and he reveals her ability to shapeshift. Carlsen and SAS Colonel Colin Caine trace her to a psychiatric hospital in Yorkshire. The two believe they have managed to trap her within the heavily sedated body of the hospital's manager, Dr. Armstrong. Carlsen and Caine later learn they were deceived, as the aliens had wanted to draw them out of London.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The two male vampires have survived by shapeshifting into the soldiers who killed their previous bodies, and now the pair are infecting most of London's population. As Carlsen and Caine are transporting Dr. Armstrong back to London, the female alien escapes from her sedated host and disappears. Martial law is declared as the vampire plague sweeps through the city; the victims seeking out other humans to absorb their life force and perpetuate the cycle. The absorbed life forces are channeled by the male vampires to the female vampire, who transmits the accumulated energy to their spaceship, which is now in geosynchronous orbit over London.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Dr. Fallada impales one of the male vampires with an ancient weapon of "leaded iron". He contacts Carlsen and Caine and surmises that the creatures have visited Earth periodically with the coming of Halley's Comet, creating the vampire legends. He delivers the weapon to Caine before succumbing to the infection. The female vampire is tracked by Carlsen to St. Paul's Cathedral, where she is lying upon the altar, transferring energy to her spaceship. She reveals, much to Carlsen's shock, that they are a part of each other due to the sharing of their life forces, thus sharing their psychic bond. Caine follows Carlsen to the cathedral and is intercepted by the second male vampire, whom he kills. Caine throws the weapon to Carlsen, who impales himself and the female alien simultaneously. This action causes the release of a burst of energy that blows open the dome of St. Paul's. The two ascend the column of energy to the spaceship, which then returns to the comet as Caine watches.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Noted stage actor Patrick Connor played the Fatherly Guard, while Nicholas Donnelly played a Police Inspector, Julian Firth (no relation to Peter Firth) had an early role as Second Boy in Park, and Richard Oldfield played the Mission Leader.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: "Lifeforce" was the first film of Tobe Hooper's three-picture deal with Cannon Films, following "Poltergeist" in 1982, which was a collaboration with producer Steven Spielberg. The other two films are the remake of "Invaders from Mars" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2".


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Filming began on 2 February 1984. Before Hooper was finally approved, Michael Winner was offered the chance to direct the film.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The film was originally filmed and promoted under the same title as the Colin Wilson novel. Cannon Films, which reportedly spent nearly $25 million in hopes of creating a blockbuster film, disliked "The Space Vampires" for sounding too much like another of the studio's typical low budget exploitation films. As a result, the title was changed to "Lifeforce", referring to the spiritual energy the space vampires drain from their victims, and it was edited for its US theatrical release by TriStar Pictures into a 101-minute domestic cut that was partially re-scored by Michael Kamen, with a majority of Henry Mancini's original music remaining.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: It has been suggested that "Lifeforce" is largely a remake of Hammer Film Productions's "Quatermass and the Pit". In an interview, director Tobe Hooper discussed how Cannon Films gave him $25 million, free rein, and Colin Wilson's book "The Space Vampires". Hooper then shares how giddy he was: "I thought I'd go back to my roots and make a 70 mm Hammer film."


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The screenplay was written by Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby (both would also collaborate with Tobe Hooper in "Invaders from Mars"). Hooper came up with the idea of using Halley's Comet in the screenplay, rather than the asteroid belt as originally used in the novel, as the comet was going to pass by Earth one year following the film's release. The time settings were also changed from the mid-21st century to the present day. Michael Armstrong and Olaf Pooley were brought on during production to perform uncredited rewrites, Armstrong acting as a liaison between Hooper and the art department.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Hooper later said, "The spirit of the book is certainly there from my interpretation of the reading. Though Colin Wilson's novel was set in the future, I made it a contemporary piece for identification. Also, I tied in Halley's comet, where they make the find of the alien ship. It has been millions of years in the coma of Halley's comet, traveling as a parasite of sorts. But, basically, I think the movie embodies the same spiritual feeling that Colin Wilson intended."


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Colin Wilson was unhappy with the way the film turned out. He wrote of it, "John Fowles had once told me that the film of "The Magus" was the worst movie ever made. After seeing "Lifeforce" I sent him a postcard telling him that I had gone one better."


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Hooper later said ""Lifeforce" had a great look but lacked a screenplay. There wasn't a hell of a lot that could be done about that except to change it completely. The film started off as "Space Vampires", and that's actually what it should've been called. With that title you'd look at that picture with a completely different set of sunglasses!"


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: In February 1984, Billy Idol said he had been offered a lead role as a vampire by Hooper, who had directed the video of "Dancing with Myself", but turned it down due to touring commitments.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: In April John Gielgud said "I was recently offered an enormous sum to play in a film called "Space Vampires", and I nearly fell for it because it would have been nice to have had the money. But the next time I heard from them the figure had somehow been reduced by half, so I said no".


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The film was shot in Britain. It was originally scheduled for 17 weeks. It went five weeks over. "The Cannon people were great," Railsback said. "All they told Tobe was: 'Keep going.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The film marked the fourth project to feature special effects produced by Academy Award winner John Dykstra, who in 1986 was granted with the "Caixa Catalunya Award for Best Special Effects" in the Sitges Film Festival (located in Spain) for his special effects work in "Lifeforce". The umbrella-like alien spaceship was modelled after an artichoke, while the model London destroyed in the film was actually the remains of Tucktonia, a model village near Christchurch, United Kingdom, that had closed not long before the shooting of the film. It took a week to film the death scene of the pathologist played by Jerome Willis, and bodycasts of Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart and Aubrey Morris were made by make-up effects supervisor Nick Maley for their death scenes.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: One effect near the end of the film involving the column of energy rising from the female alien through the top of St. Paul's Cathedral to the spacecraft was engineered by art director Tony Reading. A column of retroreflective material was placed against black velvet and a crew member blew cigar smoke into its bottom. This image was then front projected onto a translucent projection screen behind the actors to create the energy column.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: James Horner was first asked to write the score before Henry Mancini was brought in and produced a score consisting of 90 minutes of occasionally atonal and ambient music using the London Symphony Orchestra. Mancini had agreed to do the film based on the original concept of a 15-minute essentially dialogue-free opening sequence involving the discovery and exploration of the alien spacecraft and the moving of the three aliens back to the "Churchill", for which he composed a tonal "space ballet".


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: For the American domestic version, Michael Kamen and James Guthrie were asked to write occasional music cues that were placed in at the last minute.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The initial cut of "Lifeforce" as edited by Tobe Hooper was 128 minutes long. This is 12 minutes longer than the final version which had several scenes cut, most of them taking place on the Space Shuttle "Churchill". According to Nicholas Ball, who played the main British astronaut, Derebridge, it was felt that there was too much material in outer space and so the majority of the "Churchill" scenes were deleted. Also, most of Nicholas Ball's performance ended up on the cutting room floor according to an interview he gave on the UK talk show "Wogan" in 1985.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: According to interviews with Bill Malin, who plays one of the male vampires, the film went over schedule during production. Because of this some important scenes were never shot, and the film was shut down at one time because the studio had simply run out of money.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Despite being credited on the US domestic cut, the following actors were deleted from that cut of the film: John Woodnutt, John Forbes-Robertson and Russell Sommers. The "Churchill" commanding officer Rawlins, played by Geoffrey Frederick, was British, but in post-production it was decided that Patrick Jordan would dub his voice. Also in the US version, some of Geoffrey Frederick's voiceover heard on the "Churchill" is dubbed.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: "Lifeforce" was released on 21 June 1985 to poor box office returns. The film opened in fourth place, losing a head-to-head battle against Ron Howard's science fiction film, "Cocoon". The film earned $11,603,545 at the US box office.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: On release, the film received negative reviews from American critics. Janet Maslin, of "The New York Times", wrote, '[I]ts style is shrill and fragmented enough to turn "Lifeforce" into hysterical vampire porn." Michael Wilmington, in the "Los Angeles Times", wrote that the film was 'such a peculiar movie [that] it's difficult to get a handle on it'. Jay Carr wrote in "The Boston Globe" that 'it plays like a tap-dancing zombie'. John Clute dismissed "Lifeforce" as a 'deeply silly flick'. Leonard Maltin called the film 'completely crazy' and said it was 'ridiculous, but so bizarre, it's fascinating'.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: On the other hand, horror and comic book writer C. J. Henderson praised the film: ""Lifeforce" is an incredible film, and may by be the most intelligent vampire movie ever made...[the ideas presented in "Lifeforce"] are beyond [other vampire movies,] beyond all of them, light-years beyond...the story is what makes this movie hum..."Lifeforce" is a true, thinking sci-fi fan's film". Andrew Migliore and John Strysik, in their "Lurker in the Lobby", explained that Colin Wilson wrote "The Space Vampires" as a consequence of H.P. Lovecraft's publisher August Derleth challenging Wilson (who was critical of Lovecraft's writing) to write a Lovecraftian novel himself (a challenge that resulted in three such novels, "The Mind Parasites", "The Space Vampires", and "The Philosopher's Stone"), and they continued, ""Lifeforce" is big, splashy, and...the scenes of an apocalyptic London are not to be missed. And the film, an obvious tribute to Nigel Kneale's "Quatermass", has deep roots in Lovecraft's mythos". Film critic Gene Siskel, of "Siskel & Ebert", called the film a "guilty-pleasure", awarding it 3 out of 4 stars.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, "Lifeforce" holds a 57% approval rating based on 30 critic reviews, with an average rating of 5.6/10. The consensus reads, "Brazenly strange and uneven in its execution, "Lifeforce" is an otherworldly sci-fi excursion punctuated with off-kilter horror flourishes." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 50 out of 100 based on 12 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: The first release on video in the UK was the heavily edited US "domestic cut". The full "international cut" was not available until it was released by MGM in the 2000s. The first US release of the "international cut" was MGM/UA's 1994 release on deluxe widescreen letterboxed LaserDisc.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Scream Factory announced they would be releasing "Lifeforce" in a Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack on 18 June 2013. This included the US domestic cut, as well as the international cut of the film.


title: Lifeforce (film)

text: Arrow Video released "Lifeforce" in the UK as a steelbook two-disc Blu-ray special edition on 14 October 2013, with the same features as the US Blu-ray release.


title: Spice trade

text: The spice trade involved historical civilizations in Asia, Northeast Africa and Europe. Spices such as cinnamon, cassia, cardamom, ginger, pepper, nutmeg, star anise, clove, and turmeric were known and used in antiquity and traded in the Eastern World. These spices found their way into the Near East before the beginning of the Christian era, with fantastic tales hiding their true sources.


title: Spice trade

text: The maritime aspect of the trade was dominated by the Austronesian peoples in Southeast Asia, namely the ancient Indonesian sailors who established routes from Southeast Asia to Sri Lanka and India (and later China) by 1500 BC. These goods were then transported by land towards the Mediterranean and the Greco-Roman world via the incense route and the Roman–India routes by Indian and Persian traders. The Austronesian maritime trade lanes later expanded into the Middle East and eastern Africa by the 1st millennium AD, resulting in the Austronesian colonization of Madagascar.


title: Spice trade

text: Within specific regions, the Kingdom of Axum (5th century BC–AD 11th century) had pioneered the Red Sea route before the 1st century AD. During the first millennium AD, Ethiopians became the maritime trading power of the Red Sea. By this period, trade routes existed from Sri Lanka (the Roman Taprobane) and India, which had acquired maritime technology from early Austronesian contact. By mid-7th century AD, after the rise of Islam, Arab traders started plying these maritime routes and dominated the western Indian Ocean maritime routes.


title: Spice trade

text: Arab traders eventually took over conveying goods via the Levant and Venetian merchants to Europe until the rise of the Seljuk Turks in 1090. Later the Ottoman Turks held the route again by 1453 respectively. Overland routes helped the spice trade initially, but maritime trade routes led to tremendous growth in commercial activities to Europe.


title: Spice trade

text: The trade was changed by the Crusades and later the European Age of Discovery, during which the spice trade, particularly in black pepper, became an influential activity for European traders. From the 11th to the 15th centuries, the Italian maritime republics of Venice and Genoa monopolized the trade between Europe and Asia. The Cape Route from Europe to the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope was pioneered by the Portuguese explorer navigator Vasco da Gama in 1498, resulting in new maritime routes for trade.


title: Spice trade

text: This trade, which drove world trade from the end of the Middle Ages well into the Renaissance, ushered in an age of European domination in the East. Channels such as the Bay of Bengal served as bridges for cultural and commercial exchanges between diverse cultures as nations struggled to gain control of the trade along the many spice routes. In 1571 the Spanish opened the first trans-Pacific route between its territories of the Philippines and Mexico, served by the Manila Galleon. This trade route lasted until 1815. The Portuguese trade routes were mainly restricted and limited by the use of ancient routes, ports, and nations that were difficult to dominate. The Dutch were later able to bypass many of these problems by pioneering a direct ocean route from the Cape of Good Hope to the Sunda Strait in Indonesia.


title: Spice trade

text: People from the Neolithic period traded in spices, obsidian, sea shells, precious stones and other high-value materials as early as the 10th millennium BC. The first to mention the trade in historical periods are the Egyptians. In the 3rd millennium BC, they traded with the Land of Punt, which is believed to have been situated in an area encompassing northern Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea and the Red Sea coast of Sudan.


title: Spice trade

text: The spice trade was associated with overland routes early on, but maritime routes proved to be the factor which helped the trade grow. The first true maritime trade network in the Indian Ocean was by the Austronesian peoples of Island Southeast Asia. They established trade routes with Southern India and Sri Lanka as early as 1500 BC, ushering an exchange of material culture (like catamarans, outrigger boats, lashed-lug and sewn-plank boats, and paan) and cultigens (like coconuts, sandalwood, bananas, and sugarcane), as well as connecting the material cultures of India and China. Indonesians in particular were trading in spices (mainly cinnamon and cassia) with East Africa using catamaran and outrigger boats and sailing with the help of the westerlies in the Indian Ocean. This trade network expanded to reach as far as Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, resulting in the Austronesian colonization of Madagascar by the first half of the first millennium AD. It continued into historic times, later becoming the Maritime Silk Road.


title: Spice trade

text: In the first millennium BC the Arabs, Phoenicians, and Indians were also engaged in sea and land trade in luxury goods such as spices, gold, precious stones, leather of exotic animals, ebony and pearls. The sea trade was in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The sea route in the Red Sea was from Bab-el-Mandeb to Berenike, from there by land to the Nile, and then by boats to Alexandria. Luxury goods including Indian spices, ebony, silk and fine textiles were traded along the overland incense route.


title: Spice trade

text: In the second half of the first millennium BC the Arab tribes of South and West Arabia took control over the land trade of spices from South Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea. These tribes were the M'ain, Qataban, Hadhramaut, Saba and Himyarite. In the north the Nabateans took control of the trade route that crossed the Negev from Petra to Gaza. The trade enriched these tribes. South Arabia was called Eudaemon Arabia (the elated Arabia) by the Greeks and was on the agenda of conquests of Alexander of Macedonia before he died. The Indians and the Arabs had control over the sea trade with India. In the late second century BC, the Greeks from the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt learned from the Indians how to sail directly from Aden to the west coast of India using the monsoon winds (as did Hippalus) and took control of the sea trade via Red Sea ports.


title: Spice trade

text: Spices are discussed in biblical narratives, and there is literary evidence for their use in ancient Greek and Roman society. There is a record from Tamil texts of Greeks purchasing large sacks of black pepper from India, and many recipes in the 1st-century Roman cookbook "Apicius" make use of the spice. The trade in spices lessened after the fall of the Roman Empire, but demand for ginger, black pepper, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg revived the trade in later centuries.


title: Spice trade

text: Rome played a part in the spice trade during the 5th century, but this role, unlike the Arabian one, did not last through the Middle Ages. The rise of Islam brought a significant change to the trade as Radhanite Jewish and Arab merchants, particularly from Egypt, eventually took over conveying goods via the Levant to Europe. At times, Jews enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the spice trade in large parts of Western Europe.


title: Spice trade

text: The spice trade had brought great riches to the Abbasid Caliphate and inspired famous legends such as that of Sinbad the Sailor. These early sailors and merchants would often set sail from the port city of Basra and, after many ports of call, would return to sell their goods, including spices, in Baghdad. The fame of many spices such as nutmeg and cinnamon are attributed to these early spice merchants.


title: Spice trade

text: The Indian commercial connection with South East Asia proved vital to the merchants of Arabia and Persia during the 7th and 8th centuries. Arab traders — mainly descendants of sailors from Yemen and Oman — dominated maritime routes throughout the Indian Ocean, tapping source regions in the Far East and linking to the secret "spice islands" (Maluku Islands and Banda Islands). The islands of Molucca also find mention in several records: a Javanese chronicle (1365) mentions the Moluccas and "Maloko", and navigational works of the 14th and 15th centuries contain the first unequivocal Arab reference to Moluccas. Sulaima al-Mahr writes: "East of Timor [where sandalwood is found] are the islands of "Bandam" and they are the islands where nutmeg and mace are found. The islands of cloves are called "Maluku" ..."


title: Spice trade

text: Moluccan products were shipped to trading emporiums in India, passing through ports like Kozhikode in Kerala and through Sri Lanka. From there they were shipped westward across the ports of Arabia to the Near East, to Ormus in the Persian Gulf and Jeddah in the Red Sea and sometimes to East Africa, where they were used for many purposes, including burial rites. The Abbasids used Alexandria, Damietta, Aden and Siraf as entry ports to trade with India and China. Merchants arriving from India in the port city of Aden paid tribute in form of musk, camphor, ambergris and sandalwood to Ibn Ziyad, the sultan of Yemen.


title: Spice trade

text: Indian spice exports find mention in the works of Ibn Khurdadhbeh (850), al-Ghafiqi (1150), Ishak bin Imaran (907) and Al Kalkashandi (14th century). Chinese traveler Xuanzang mentions the town of Puri where "merchants depart for distant countries."


title: Spice trade

text: From there, overland routes led to the Mediterranean coasts. From the 8th until the 15th century, maritime republics (Republic of Venice, Republic of Pisa, Republic of Genoa, Duchy of Amalfi, Duchy of Gaeta, Republic of Ancona and Republic of Ragusa) held a monopoly on European trade with the Middle East. The silk and spice trade, involving spices, incense, herbs, drugs and opium, made these Mediterranean city-states extremely wealthy. Spices were among the most expensive and in-demand products of the Middle Ages, used in medicine as well as in the kitchen. They were all imported from Asia and Africa. Venetian and other navigators of maritime republics then distributed the goods through Europe.


title: Spice trade

text: The Ottoman Empire, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, barred Europeans from important combined land-sea routes.


title: Spice trade

text: The Republic of Venice had become a formidable power and a key player in the Eastern spice trade. Other powers, in an attempt to break the Venetian hold on spice trade, began to build up maritime capability. Until the mid-15th century, trade with the East was achieved through the Silk Road, with the Byzantine Empire and the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa acting as middlemen.


title: Spice trade

text: In 1453, however, the Ottoman Empire took control of the sole spice trade route that existed at the time after the fall of Constantinople, and were in a favorable position to charge hefty taxes on merchandise bound for the west. The Western Europeans, not wanting to be dependent on an expansionist, non-Christian power for the lucrative commerce with the East, set out to find an alternative route by sea around Africa.


title: Spice trade

text: The first country to attempt to circumnavigate Africa was Portugal, which had, since the early 15th century, begun to explore northern Africa under Henry the Navigator. Emboldened by these early successes and eyeing a lucrative monopoly on a possible sea route to the Indies, the Portuguese first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 on an expedition led by Bartolomeu Dias. Just nine years later in 1497, on the orders of Manuel I of Portugal, four vessels under the command of navigator Vasco da Gama continued beyond to the eastern coast of Africa to Malindi and sailed across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, on the Malabar Coast in Kerala in South India — the capital of the local Zamorin rulers. The wealth of the Indies was now open for the Europeans to explore; the Portuguese Empire was the earliest European seaborne empire to grow from the spice trade.


title: Spice trade

text: In 1511, Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Malacca for Portugal, then the center of Asian trade. East of Malacca, Albuquerque sent several diplomatic and exploratory missions, including to the Moluccas. Learning the secret location of the Spice Islands, mainly the Banda Islands, then the world source of nutmeg, he sent an expedition led by António de Abreu to Banda, where they were the first Europeans to arrive, in early 1512. Abreu's expedition reached Buru, Ambon and Seram Islands, and then Banda.


title: Spice trade

text: From 1507 to 1515 Albuquerque tried to completely block Arab and other traditional routes that stretched from the shores of Western Pacific to the Mediterranean Sea, through the conquest of strategic bases in the Persian Gulf and at the entry of the Red Sea.


title: Spice trade

text: By the early 16th century the Portuguese had complete control of the African sea route, which extended through a long network of routes that linked three oceans, from the Moluccas (the Spice Islands) in the Pacific Ocean limits, through Malacca, Kerala and Sri Lanka, to Lisbon in Portugal.


title: Spice trade

text: The Crown of Castile had organized the expedition of Christopher Columbus to compete with Portugal for the spice trade with Asia, but when Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola (in what is now Haiti) instead of in the Indies, the search for a route to Asia was postponed until a few years later. After Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513, the Spanish Crown prepared a westward voyage by Ferdinand Magellan in order to reach Asia from Spain across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. On October 21, 1520, his expedition crossed the Strait of Magellan in the southern tip of South America, opening the Pacific to European exploration. On March 16, 1521, the ships reached the Philippines and soon after the Spice Islands, ultimately resulting decades later in the Manila Galleon trade, the first westward spice trade route to Asia. After Magellan's death in the Philippines, navigator Juan Sebastian Elcano took command of the expedition and drove it across the Indian Ocean and back to Spain, where they arrived in 1522 aboard the last remaining ship, the "Victoria". For the next two-and-a-half centuries, Spain controlled a vast trade network that linked three continents: Asia, the Americas and Europe. A global spice route had been created: from Manila in the Philippines (Asia) to Seville in Spain (Europe), via Acapulco in Mexico (North America).


title: Spice trade

text: One of the most important technological exchanges of the spice trade network was the early introduction of maritime technologies to India, the Middle East, East Africa, and China by the Austronesian peoples. These technologies include the plank-sewn hulls, catamarans, outrigger boats, and possibly the lateen sail. This is still evident in Sri Lankan and South Indian languages. For example, Tamil "paṭavu", Telugu "paḍava", and Kannada "paḍahu", all meaning "ship", are all derived from Proto-Hesperonesian "*padaw", "sailboat", with Austronesian cognates like Javanese "perahu", Kadazan "padau", Maranao "padaw", Cebuano "paráw", Samoan "folau", Hawaiian "halau", and Māori "wharau".


title: Spice trade

text: Austronesians also introduced many Austronesian cultigens to southern India, Sri Lanka, and eastern Africa that figured prominently in the spice trade. They include bananas, Pacific domesticated coconuts, "Dioscorea" yams, wetland rice, sandalwood, giant taro, Polynesian arrowroot, ginger, lengkuas, tailed pepper, betel, areca nut, and sugarcane.


title: Spice trade

text: Hindu and Buddhist religious establishments of Southeast Asia came to be associated with economic activity and commerce as patrons, entrusted large funds which would later be used to benefit local economies by estate management, craftsmanship, and promotion of trading activities. Buddhism, in particular, traveled alongside the maritime trade, promoting coinage, art, and literacy. Islam spread throughout the East, reaching maritime Southeast Asia in the 10th century; Muslim merchants played a crucial part in the trade. Christian missionaries, such as Saint Francis Xavier, were instrumental in the spread of Christianity in the East. Christianity competed with Islam to become the dominant religion of the Moluccas. However, the natives of the Spice Islands accommodated to aspects of both religions easily.


title: Spice trade

text: The Portuguese colonial settlements saw traders such as the Gujarati banias, South Indian Chettis, Syrian Christians, Chinese from Fujian province, and Arabs from Aden involved in the spice trade. Epics, languages, and cultural customs were borrowed by Southeast Asia from India, and later China. Knowledge of Portuguese language became essential for merchants involved in the trade. The colonial pepper trade drastically changed the experience of modernity in Europe, and in Kerala and it brought, along with colonialism, early capitalism to India's Malabar Coast, changing cultures of work and caste.


title: Spice trade

text: Indian merchants involved in spice trade took Indian cuisine to Southeast Asia, notably present day Malaysia and Indonesia, where spice mixtures and black pepper became popular. Conversely, Southeast Asian cuisine and crops was also introduced to India and Sri Lanka, where rice cakes and coconut milk-based dishes are still dominant.


title: Spice trade

text: European people intermarried with Indians and popularized valuable culinary skills, such as baking, in India. Indian food, adapted to the European palate, became visible in England by 1811 as exclusive establishments began catering to the tastes of both the curious and those returning from India. Opium was a part of the spice trade, and some people involved in the spice trade were driven by opium addiction.


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: The untitled seventh studio album by German Neue Deutsche Härte band Rammstein, titled Rammstein on digital platforms and on CD-Text enabled devices, was released on 17 May 2019 through Universal Music. Their first studio album in ten years, it is their first not to be produced by Jacob Hellner; it was instead produced by Emigrate guitarist Olsen Involtini, who also serves as Rammstein's live sound engineer.


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: The album received positive reviews from critics. It was also commercially successful, reaching number one in over ten countries. It set a record for the most units of an album sold in its first week in Germany during the 21st century, and was the best-selling album of 2019 in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It was also certified 5× Gold by the BVMI for selling at least 500,000 copies in Germany. The album was supported by the singles "Deutschland", "Radio", and "Ausländer", with "Deutschland" becoming their second number-one hit in Germany and the other two entering the top 5.


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: The album's overall sound has been described as Neue Deutsche Härte, industrial metal, and electro-industrial. "Zeig Dich" criticizes the Catholic church. Backed by "powerful thumping guitar riffs", the lyrics demand religious leaders to "stop hiding behind their so-called Lord". The composition also features a Latin-language choir and Spanish-styled finger picking. "Louder" thought the song is reminiscent of "Mutter"s "Zwitter". "Sex" discusses sex as something "'disgusting', yet life-giving" and reminded the portal of Rob Zombie and Queens of the Stone Age. "Puppe" contains a strong doom metal influence, and tells the story of a child playing with their doll in a room while their sister - presumably underage - prostitutes herself at the room beside theirs. As the sister screams, the child grows increasingly agitated until they start biting the doll's head off. The ending verses suggest the child eventually sneaks into the sister's room, finds her being beaten to death and kills the attacker. The instrumentation was described by "Louder" as having "eerie synths, jangling guitars and pummelling vocals".


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: "Was Ich Liebe" has elements of Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" and an acoustic guitar section sounding like "Stairway to Heaven", by Led Zeppelin, while "Diamant" is a soft ballad describing "a breakneck voyage through the multifaceted stages of romantic despair". "Weit Weg" has elements of Tangerine Dream and Kosmischer Läufer and its lyrics describe a man secretly watching a woman undress through a window, and could be "an allegory for the way cam girls (or, sex workers more broadly) are put at risk from the blurred realities of some of their clients who believe their interactions to be more than they are". "Tattoo" evokes thrash and heavy metal of the 1980s and early 1990s. The lyrics allude to the identification of inmates in German concentration camps while also discussing tattoos as a modern trend. The ending track "Hallomann" is about a child abuser who lures a girl into his car and drowns her later and features "thrumming bass, eerie synths, kick-your-back-door in riffs and a goosebump-inducing vocal".


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: In January 2019, Richard Kruspe said there would be five music videos created for the album. Teaser clips for the first music video were released in late March. These clips featured visuals from the video along with the Roman numerals for the date 28 March 2019. On that day, the song "Deutschland" was released as the album's lead single on digital platforms, and its 10-minute-long music video was uploaded onto YouTube. The single also came with a remix by Kruspe. The band said the album had no title and would be released on 17 May 2019. The music video was viewed 19 million times in the first four days after its release. "Deutschland" was released physically as both a 7-inch vinyl and CD single on 12 April, with the remix acting as the B-side. The track list was revealed between 16 April and 19 April on the band's YouTube channel with snippets of riffs from each song. The cover of the album was also revealed there on 18 April. The twenty-seconds video teaser with the album cover presentation featured shots of Kakhovska square in Ukrainian city of Kherson. Less than a week later, the band began teasing a music video for the song "Radio", which was released on 26 April.


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: The album was released on 17 May 2019 through Universal Music. It was distributed by Vertigo/Capitol in Europe, Spinefarm Records in the United Kingdom, and Caroline International in the United States. Physically, it received a double-180 gram vinyl release and two different CD releases. Both CD releases featured digipak packaging and booklets, with the deluxe edition having more panels and a larger booklet. On 26 May, the band teased a music video for the album's third single, "Ausländer". The video was released on 28 May and the single was released on 31 May.


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: The album received positive reviews. On review aggregator website Metacritic, it holds an average review score of 82/100, based on 11 reviews indicating "universal acclaim". In a positive review, "NME" wrote, "this album is undoubtedly a resounding triumph". Nick Ruskell at "Kerrang!" wrote, "this is a record made with care, craft, and nothing allowed in that isn't just-so". Wall of Sound gave the album 9.5/10 stating: ""Rammstein" is seemingly a culmination of the previous six studio albums, taking the best parts of the last few decades and putting it all in one album, while throwing in a few unexpected surprises." Kory Grow of "Rolling Stone" wrote, "In some ways, Rammstein have grown up in their decade of hibernation but mostly they have not. The band had ascended in the anything-goes nu-metal Nineties, blending new-wave synths with air-tight heavy-metal guitar riffs and disco drumbeats... Over time, their sound became more polished and more rigid (and by proxy more Germanic?) but they still held onto their puerile impulses. “Deutschland” is the only song of any lyrical consequence on Rammstein — the rest piddle between the benign and letchy. But because it's all in German, it's not entirely clear which is which." Lukas Wojcicky in his review for "Exclaim!" commented, "Rammstein's Untitled is believed by many to be the band's swan song, as each member's age hovers around 50. Considering the band hadn't released an album in ten years, a retirement announcement would not have come as a surprise, but instead we got one final album and at least a couple of years of touring to follow. For this reason, this album is a welcome addition to Rammstein's discography and one that will be chanted with equal fervour when they come to a city near you."


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: The album debuted atop the German album charts on issue date 24 May 2019. In the first week in Germany, it moved 260,000 album-equivalent units, making it the best-performing album in the first week from a band in the 21st century. The album spent the next two weeks at No. 2 before climbing back up to No. 1 on 14 June. It spent two more non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 afterward. The album also spent an entire year inside the top 40 of the chart, not leaving it until 12 June 2020. Additionally, it spent 127 consecutive weeks in the chart before leaving it on the week of 29 October 2021.


title: Untitled Rammstein album

text: Elsewhere, the album peaked at No. 3 on the UK Albums Chart, selling 12,130 copies and spent three consecutive weeks atop the UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart. In the United States, the album peaked at No. 9 on the "Billboard" 200, earning 28,000 album-equivalent units in its first week. The album is the band's first to reach the top 10 in the United States. Additionally, it topped the Hard Rock Albums chart, the second Rammstein album to do so (previously "Liebe ist für alle da" in 2009) and World Albums chart, which make it the first German-language studio album to top this chart (previously "", a live album, topped this chart, in 2017). On 15 April 2020, the album was certified 5× Gold by the Bundesverband Musikindustrie for sales of over 500,000 album-equivalent units in Germany.


title: Economic history of India

text: India was the one of the largest economies in the world, for about two and a half millennia starting around the end of 1st millennium BC and ending around the beginning of British rule in India.


title: Economic history of India

text: Around 500 BC, the Mahajanapadas minted punch-marked silver coins. The period was marked by intensive trade activity and urban development. By 300 BC, the Maurya Empire had united most of the Indian subcontinent including Tamilakam, which was ruled by Three Crowned Kings. The resulting political unity and military security allowed for a common economic system and enhanced trade and commerce, with increased agricultural productivity.


title: Economic history of India

text: The Maurya Empire was followed by classical and early medieval kingdoms, including the Cholas, Pandyas, Cheras, Guptas, Western Gangas, Harsha, Palas, Rashtrakutas and Hoysalas. The Indian subcontinent had the largest economy of any region in the world for most of the interval between the 1st and 18th centuries. Until 1000 AD, it was a subsistence economy with GDP per capita just above subsistence level, and with no GDP growth between 1 and 1000 AD.


title: Economic history of India

text: India experienced per-capita GDP growth in the high medieval era, coinciding with the Delhi Sultanate in the north and the Vijayanagara Empire in the south. By the late 17th century, most of the Indian subcontinent had been reunited under the Mughal Empire, which for a time became the largest economy and manufacturing power in the world, producing about a quarter of global GDP, before fragmenting and being conquered over the next century. Bengal Subah, the empire's wealthiest province, that solely accounted for 40% of Dutch imports outside the west, had an advanced, productive agriculture, textile manufacturing and shipbuilding, in a period of proto-industrialization.


title: Economic history of India

text: By the 18th century, the Mysoreans had embarked on an ambitious economic development program that established the Kingdom of Mysore as a major economic power. Sivramkrishna analyzing agricultural surveys conducted in Mysore by Francis Buchanan in 1800-1801, arrived at estimates, using "subsistence basket", that aggregated millet income could be almost five times subsistence level. The Maratha Empire also managed an effective administration and tax collection policy throughout the core areas under its control and extracted chauth from vassal states.


title: Economic history of India

text: India experienced deindustrialisation and cessation of various craft industries under British rule, which along with fast economic and population growth in the Western world, resulted in India's share of the world economy declining from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950, and its share of global industrial output declining from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900. Due to its ancient history as a trading zone and later its colonial status, colonial India remained economically integrated with the world, with high levels of trade, investment and migration.


title: Economic history of India

text: The Republic of India, founded in 1947, adopted central planning for most of its independent history, with extensive public ownership, regulation, red tape and trade barriers. After the 1991 economic crisis, the central government began policy of economic liberalisation.


title: Economic history of India

text: From the 1st century AD to the start of British colonisation in India in the 17th century, India's GDP was between about 25 and 35% of the world's total GDP, which dropped to 2% by Independence of India in 1947. At the same time, the Britain's share of the world economy rose from 2.9% in 1700 up to 9% in 1870 alone, due to industrialisation.


title: Economic history of India

text: The Indus Valley civilisation, the first known permanent and predominantly urban settlement, flourished between 3500 BCE and 1800 BCE. It featured an advanced and thriving economic system. Its citizens practised agriculture, domesticated animals, made sharp tools and weapons from copper, bronze and tin, and traded with other cities. Evidence of well-laid streets, drainage systems and water supply in the valley's major cities, Dholavira, Harappa, Lothal, Mohenjo-daro and Rakhigarhi, reveals their knowledge of urban planning.


title: Economic history of India

text: Although ancient India had a significant urban population, much of India's population resided in villages, whose economies were largely isolated and self-sustaining. Agriculture was the predominant occupation and satisfied a village's food requirements while providing raw materials for hand-based industries such as textile, food processing and crafts. Besides farmers, people worked as barbers, carpenters, doctors (Ayurvedic practitioners), goldsmiths and weavers.


title: Economic history of India

text: Religion played an influential role in shaping economic activities. Pilgrimage towns like Prayagraj, Varanasi, Nasik and Puri, mostly centred around rivers, developed into centres of trade and commerce. Religious functions, festivals and the practice of taking a pilgrimage resulted in an early version of the hospitality industry.


title: Economic history of India

text: Economics in Jainism is influenced by Mahavira and his philosophy. He was the last of the 24 Tirthankars, who spread Jainism. Relating to economics, he emphasised the importance of the concept of 'anekanta' (non-absolutism).


title: Economic history of India

text: In the joint family system, members of a family pooled their resources to maintain the family and invest in business ventures. The system ensured younger members were trained and employed and that older and disabled members would be supported. The system prevented agricultural land from splitting with each generation, aiding yield from the benefits of scale. Such sanctions curbed rivalry in junior members and instilled a sense of obedience.


title: Economic history of India

text: Along with the family- and individually-owned businesses, ancient India possessed other forms of engaging in collective activity, including the gana, pani, puga, vrata, sangha, nigama and Shreni. Nigama, pani and Shreni refer most often to economic organisations of merchants, craftspeople and artisans, and perhaps even para-military entities. In particular, the Shreni shared many similarities with modern corporations, which were used in India from around the 8th century BC until around the 10th century AD. The use of such entities in ancient India was widespread, including in virtually every kind of business, political and municipal activity.


title: Economic history of India

text: The Shreni was a separate legal entity that had the ability to hold property separately from its owners, construct its own rules for governing the behaviour of its members and for it to contract, sue and be sued in its own name. Ancient sources such as "Laws of Manu" VIII and Chanakya's "Arthashastra" provided rules for lawsuits between two or more Shreni and some sources make reference to a government official ("Bhandagarika") who worked as an arbitrator for disputes amongst Shreni from at least the 6th century BC onwards. Between 18 and 150 Shreni at various times in ancient India covered both trading and craft activities. This level of specialisation is indicative of a developed economy in which the Shreni played a critical role. Some Shreni had over 1,000 members.


title: Economic history of India

text: The Shreni had a considerable degree of centralised management. The headman of the Shreni represented the interests of the Shreni in the king's court and in many business matters. The headman could bind the Shreni in contracts, set work conditions, often received higher compensation and was the administrative authority. The headman was often selected via an election by the members of the Shreni, and could also be removed from power by the general assembly. The headman often ran the enterprise with two to five executive officers, also elected by the assembly.


title: Economic history of India

text: Punch marked silver ingots were in circulation around the 5th century BC. They were the first metallic coins minted around the 6th century BC by the Mahajanapadas of the Gangetic plains and were India's earliest traces of coinage. While India's many kingdoms and rulers issued coins, barter was still widely prevalent. Villages paid a portion of their crops as revenue while its craftsmen received a stipend out of the crops for their services. Each village was mostly self-sufficient.


title: Economic history of India

text: During the Maurya Empire (c. 321–185 BC), important changes and developments affected the Indian economy. It was the first time most of India was unified under one ruler. With an empire in place, trade routes became more secure. The empire spent considerable resources building and maintaining roads. The improved infrastructure, combined with increased security, greater uniformity in measurements, and increasing usage of coins as currency, enhanced trade. During this time India's share is estimated to have been from 32% to 35% of the world economy.


title: Economic history of India

text: Maritime trade was carried out extensively between South India and Southeast and West Asia from early times until around the 14th century AD. Both the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts were the sites of important trading centres from as early as the 1st century BC, used for import and export as well as transit points between the Mediterranean region and southeast Asia. Over time, traders organised themselves into associations which received state patronage. Historians Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib claim this state patronage for overseas trade came to an end by the 13th century AD, when it was largely taken over by the local Parsi, Jewish, Syrian Christian and Muslim communities, initially on the Malabar and subsequently on the Coromandel coast.


title: Economic history of India

text: Other scholars suggest trading from India to West Asia and Eastern Europe was active between the 14th and 18th centuries. During this period, Indian traders settled in Surakhani, a suburb of greater Baku, Azerbaijan. These traders built a Hindu temple, which suggests commerce was active and prosperous for Indians by the 17th century.


title: Economic history of India

text: Further north, the Saurashtra and Bengal coasts played an important role in maritime trade, and the Gangetic plains and the Indus valley housed several centres of river-borne commerce. Most overland trade was carried out via the Khyber Pass connecting the Punjab region with Afghanistan and onward to the Middle East and Central Asia. Although many kingdoms and rulers issued coins, barter was prevalent. Villages paid a portion of their agricultural produce as revenue to the rulers, while their craftsmen received a part of the crops at harvest time for their services.


title: Economic history of India

text: Before and during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 AD), Islam underlay a cosmopolitan civilization. It offered wide-ranging international networks, including social and economic networks. They spanned large parts of Afro-Eurasia, leading to escalating circulation of goods, people, technologies and ideas. While initially disruptive, the Delhi Sultanate was responsible for integrating the Indian subcontinent into a growing world system.


title: Economic history of India

text: The period coincided with greater use of mechanical technology in the Indian subcontinent. From the 13th century onwards, India began adopting some mechanical technologies from the Islamic world, including gears and pulleys, machines with cams and cranks. The worm gear roller cotton gin was invented in the Indian subcontinent during the 13th and 14th centuries, and is still used in India through to the present day. The incorporation of the crank handle in the cotton gin first appeared in the Indian subcontinent some time during the late Delhi Sultanate or the early Mughal Empire. The production of cotton, which may have largely been spun in the villages and then taken to towns in the form of yarn to be woven into cloth textiles, was advanced by the diffusion of the spinning wheel across India during the Delhi Sultanate era, lowering the costs of yarn and helping to increase demand for cotton. The increasing use of the spinning wheel, and the incorporation of the worm gear and crank handle into the roller cotton gin, led to greatly expanded Indian cotton textile production.


title: Economic history of India

text: According to economic historian Angus Maddison in "Contours of the world economy, 1–2030 AD: essays in macro-economic history", the Indian subcontinent was the world's most productive region, from 1 AD to 1600.


title: Economic history of India

text: Economy in the Indian Subcontinent performed just as it did in ancient times, though now it would face the stress of extensive regional tensions. Parthasarathi estimated that 28,000 tonnes of bullion (mainly from the New World) flowed into the Indian subcontinent between 1600 and 1800, equating to 30% of the world's production in the period.


title: Economic history of India

text: An estimate of the annual income of Emperor Akbar's treasury in 1600 is $90 million (in contrast to the tax take of Great Britain two hundred years later in 1800, which totaled $90 million). The South Asia region was estimated to be the largest in the world in economic terms in 1600, followed by China.


title: Economic history of India

text: During the time of Akbar, the Mughal Empire was at its peak as it controlled the vast region of North India and had entered into alliances with the Deccan states. It enforced a uniform customs and tax-administration system. In 1700, the exchequer of the Emperor Aurangzeb reported an annual revenue of more than £100 million, or $450 million, more than ten times that of his contemporary Louis XIV of France, while controlling just seven times the population.


title: Economic history of India

text: By 1700, the Indian Subcontinent had become the world's largest economy, ahead of Qing China and Western Europe, containing approximately 24.2% of the world's population, and producing about a quarter of world output. India produced about 25% of global industrial output into the early 18th century. India's GDP growth increased under the Mughal Empire, exceeding growth in the prior 1,500 years. The Mughals were responsible for building an extensive road system, creating a uniform currency, and the unification of the country. The Mughals adopted and standardized the rupee currency introduced by Sur Emperor Sher Shah Suri. The Mughals minted tens of millions of coins, with purity of at least 96%, without debasement until the 1720s. The empire met global demand for Indian agricultural and industrial products.


title: Economic history of India

text: Cities and towns boomed under the Mughal Empire, which had a relatively high degree of urbanization, with up to 15% of its population living in towns (estimates vary), more than in Europe at the time and British India in the 19th century. Several cities had a population between a quarter of a million and half a million, while some including Agra (in Agra Subah) hosted up to 800,000 people and Dhaka (in Bengal Subah) with over 1 million by some accounts. Shireen Moosvi estimates that 36% of the workforce were in the 36% were in the secondary and tertiary sectors, a higher percentage in non-primary sectors than Europe at the time where 65–75% have been estimated to have been engaged in agriculture in 1750.


title: Economic history of India

text: Indian agricultural production increased. Food crops included wheat, rice, and barley, while non-food cash crops included cotton, indigo and opium. By the mid-17th century, Indian cultivators had begun to extensively grow two crops from the Americas, maize and tobacco. Bengali peasants learned techniques of mulberry cultivation and sericulture, establishing Bengal Subah as a major silk-producing region. Agriculture was advanced compared to Europe, exemplified by the earlier common use of the seed drill.


title: Economic history of India

text: The Mughal administration emphasized agrarian reform, which began under the non-Mughal Emperor Sher Shah Suri. Akbar adopted this and added more reforms. The Mughal government funded the building of irrigation systems, which produced much higher crop yields and harvests.


title: Economic history of India

text: One reform introduced by Akbar was a new land revenue system called "zabt". He replaced the tribute system with a monetary tax system based on a uniform currency. The revenue system was biased in favour of higher value cash crops such as cotton, indigo, sugar cane, tree-crops, and opium, providing state incentives to grow cash crops, adding to rising market demand. Under the "zabt" system, the Mughals conducted extensive cadastral surveying to assess the cultivated area. The Mughal state encouraged greater land cultivation by offering tax-free periods to those who brought new land under cultivation.


title: Economic history of India

text: According to evidence cited by economic historians Immanuel Wallerstein, Irfan Habib, Percival Spear, and Ashok Desai, per-capita agricultural output and standards of consumption in 17th-century Mughal India was higher than in 17th-century Europe and early 20th-century British India.


title: Economic history of India

text: Until the 18th century, Mughal India was one of the most important manufacturing centers in international trade. Key industries included textiles, shipbuilding and steel. Processed products included cotton textiles, yarns, thread, silk, jute products, metalware, and foods such as sugar, oils and butter. This growth of manufacturing has been seen as a form of proto-industrialization, similar to 18th-century Western Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution.


title: Economic history of India

text: Early modern Europe imported products from Mughal India, particularly cotton textiles, spices, peppers, indigo, silks and saltpeter (for use in munitions). European fashion, for example, became increasingly dependent on Indian textiles and silks. From the late 17th century to the early 18th century, Mughal India accounted for 95% of British imports from Asia, and the Bengal Subah province alone accounted for 40% of Dutch imports from Asia. Demand for European goods in Mughal India was lighter, Europe's exports being largely limited to some woolens, ingots, glassware, mechanical clocks, weapons, particularly blades for Firangi swords, and a few luxury items. The trade imbalance caused Europeans to export large quantities of silver and to a lesser extent gold to Mughal India to pay for South Asian imports. Indian goods, especially those from Bengal, were also exported in large quantities to other Asian markets, such as Indonesia and Japan.


title: Economic history of India

text: The largest manufacturing industry was cotton textile manufacturing, which included the production of piece goods, calicos and muslins, available unbleached in a variety of colours. The cotton textile industry was responsible for a large part of the empire's international trade. The most important center of cotton production was the Bengal Subah province, particularly around Dhaka. Bengal alone accounted for more than 50% of textiles and around 80% of silks imported by the Dutch. Bengali silk and cotton textiles were exported in large quantities to Europe, Indonesia, Japan, and Africa, where they formed a significant element in the exchange of goods for slaves, and treasure. In Britain protectionist policies, such as 1685-1774 Calico Acts, imposed tariffs on imported Indian textiles.


title: Economic history of India

text: Mughal India had a large shipbuilding industry, particularly in the Bengal Subah province. Economic historian Indrajit Ray estimates shipbuilding output of Bengal during the 16th and 17th centuries at 223,250 tons annually, compared with 23,061 tons produced in nineteen colonies in North America from 1769 to 1771.


title: Economic history of India

text: Bengal Subah was the Mughal' empire's wealthiest province, globally prominent in industries such as textile manufacturing and shipbuilding. and exporting silk and cotton textiles, steel, saltpeter and agricultural and industrial products. Bengal's capital city Dhaka was the empire's financial capital, with a population said to exceed one million.


title: Economic history of India

text: In the early half of the 18th century, Mughal Empire fell into decline, with Delhi sacked in Nader Shah's invasion of the Mughal Empire, the treasury emptied, tens of thousands killed, and many thousands more carried off, with their livestock, as slaves, weakening the empire and leading to the emergence of post-Mughal states. The Mughals were replaced by the Marathas as the dominant military power in much of India, while the other smaller regional kingdoms who were mostly late Mughal tributaries, such as the Nawabs in the north and the Nizams in the south, declared autonomy. However, the efficient Mughal tax administration system was left largely intact, with Tapan Raychaudhuri estimating revenue assessment actually increased to 50 percent or more, in contrast to China's 5 to 6 percent, to cover the cost of the wars. Similarly in the same period, Maddison gives the following estimates for the late Mughal economy's income distribution:


title: Economic history of India

text: Among the post-Mughal states that emerged in the 18th century, the dominant economic powers were Bengal Subah (under the Nawabs of Bengal) and the South Indian Kingdom of Mysore (under Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan). The former was devastated by the Maratha invasions of Bengal, which experienced six invasions, over a decade, claimed to have killed hundreds of thousands, blocked trade with the Persian and Ottoman empires, and weakened the territory's economy to the point the Nawab of Bengal agreed to a peace treaty with the Marathas. The agreement made Bengal Subah a tributary to the Marathas, agreeing to pay Rs. 1.2 million in tribute annually, as the Chauth of Bengal and Bihar. The Nawab of Bengal also paid Rs. 3.2 million to the Marathas, towards the arrears of chauth for the preceding years. The chauth was paid annually by the Nawab of Bengal, up to his defeat at the Battle of Plassey by the East India Company in 1757.


title: Economic history of India

text: Jeffrey G. Williamson argued that India went through a period of deindustrialization in the latter half of the 18th century as an indirect outcome of the collapse of the Mughal Empire, and that British rule later caused further deindustrialization. According to Williamson, the Mughal Empire's decline reduced agricultural productivity, which drove up food prices, then nominal wages, and then textile prices, which cost India textile market share to Britain even before the latter developed factory technology, though Indian textiles maintained a competitive advantage over British textiles until the 19th century. Prasannan Parthasarathi countered that several post-Mughal states did not decline, notably Bengal and Mysore, which were comparable to Britain into the late 18th century.