Alpha Book

] ivory,
wax, or slaves. The real struggle for Africa was not to come until the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
[Sidenote: In India]
Of far greater importance was Asiatic India, which, unlike America or
even Africa, offered a field favorable for commerce rather than for
conquest or for colonization. For it happened that the fertility and
extent of India--its area was half as large as that of Europe--were
taxed to their uttermost to support a population of probably two
hundred millions; and all, therefore, which Europeans desired was an
opportunity to buy Indian products, such as cotton, indigo, Spices,
dyes, drugs, silk, precious stones, and peculiar manufactures.
In the seventeenth century India was ruled by a dynasty of Mohammedan
emperors called Moguls,[Footnote: So called because racially they were
falsely supposed to be Mongols or Moguls.] who had entered the
peninsula as conquerors in the previous century and had established a
splendid court in the city of Delhi on a branch of the Ganges.


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