68	A Short History of the Middle East
central factories, but without losing the local trade, since its
regular liners making the Cape passage continued to be fed by the
'country ships' not under its command.I
The successful development of the Cape Route had largely
diverted the trade in East Indian products from the Overland
Route. The transport costs of the long desert crossing and the
profits exacted by the several middlemen through whose hands the
goods passed raised the cost of pepper from 2 JJ. per Ib. in India to
25. at Aleppo, and that of cloves from gd. per Ib. to 4s. The spices
which reached Western Europe via the Cape cost only one-third
of what they cost via Aleppo, and thus it was actually profitable for
the Levant Co. in 1614 to re-export Indian goods from England to
the Levant, since they could still undersell the same commodities
brought there by the Overland Route. By the second half of the
seventeenth century the Levant Co., three-quarters of whose im-
ports into England had consisted of Persian silk, was feeling severe-
ly the competition of the East India Co., which was importing
Persian raw silk and Indian manufactured silks and calicos via the
Cape Route. But the Privy Council had the foresight to support
the East India Co.; and the silk trade through Aleppo continued to
decline to one-half of its former figure.
The strain of the wars of the later seventeenth century, first
against England and then against Louis XIV of France, was too
much for the vitality of the Dutch state, and her commercial activi-
ties in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf began to flag. Mean-
while France, under Louis XIV's far-seeing minister Colbert, had
begun to plan the creation of a maritime commercial empire. He
opened factories in India, sent an embassy to Persia in 1664 and ob-
tained trading-rights at Bandar Abbas and Isfahan. French com-
petition in the Levant also was stimulated by Colbert, and during
the eighteenth century her commercial interests in these lands were
always greater than the English. In Egypt France secured a virtual
monopoly, with fifty merchants in Cairo in 1702 and other estab-
lishments at Alexandria and Rosetta, compared with only two
English merchants at Cairo and Alexandria. The policy of the
Levant Co., which was content to secure a high rate of profit on a
comparatively small volume of sales, was partly responsible for the
1 Williamson, The Ocean in English History, 101 ff., and especially 109 ff., cor-
recting the older hypothesis that the withdrawal of the East India Co. from
local trading was primarily due to successful Dutch competition.