=234. Partition of the field of commerce among companies.=—The reader will remember the discussion in a previous section of the difficulties experienced in this period when commerce was left to individuals, and the reasons for the association of the merchants who traded to any country. With that discussion in mind the organization of English commerce in the period of the later sixteenth century and following years will not seem so strange as it may appear to be at first. An ordinary Englishman could trade about 1600 with only three countries: France, Spain, and Portugal. Commerce with the rest of the world could be carried on only by members of specific companies, who had mapped out and occupied the routes of trade much as modern railroads divide the territory inside a country. Beginning in the North and going around the compass the companies were as follows: the Eastland Company, trading to Scandinavia and the Baltic; the Russia Company; the Merchant Adventurers, controlling trade from Denmark to France, where the free-trade gap appears; the Levant Company, trading in the Mediterranean; the Guinea or Africa Company; the East India Company, with its immense Asiatic field; and then the various companies familiar to students of American History, the Virginia Company, the Plymouth Company, later the Hudson’s Bay Company, etc. By means of the trade of these companies England marketed her surplus wares, especially her woolen fabrics, and imported the goods of which she stood in need—naval stores from the Baltic, manufactures and wine from the Continent, gold from Africa (cf. the English “guinea” of twenty-one shillings), Oriental products, and furs and fish from America. The colonies which had been founded in the New World were still too young to affect greatly the sum total of English trade in the early seventeenth century, but increased rapidly in commercial importance.