By five hundred years ago, however, social development had risen so much that geography changed its meanings. There were new kinds of ships that could cross what had always been impassable oceans, which abruptly made sticking out into the Atlantic a huge plus. It was Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English ships, rather than Egyptian or Iraqi ones, that started sailing to the Americas, China, and Japan. It was western Europeans who began tying the world together with maritime trade, and western European social development soared upward, overtaking the older core in the eastern Mediterranean.
