The voyages of European mariners had profound implications for cross-cultural trade, and they helped inaugurate a new era of world history by bringing all the world's regions into sustained interaction in modern times. As in the case of premodern trade, the issue of Eurocentrism looms large in the analysis of cross-cultural trade in the early modern world. Many scholars from both modernization and world-systems schools portray an aggressive and dynamic western Europe as the dominant power of the modern world from the sixteenth century forward. Driven by a ruthless energy, European merchants and adventurers supposedly sailed into the larger world, deploying superior technology and military prowess in their quest for trade and empire. In the process, by these accounts, they created the modern world and established themselves as its masters.