<P> The Muscovy Company was the first major chartered joint stock English trading company established in 1555 with a monopoly on trade between England and Muscovy . It was an offshoot of the earlier Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands, founded in 1551 by Richard Chancellor, Sebastian Cabot and Sir Hugh Willoughby to locate the Northeast Passage to China to allow trade . This was the precursor to a type of business that would soon flourish in England, the Dutch Republic and elsewhere . </P> <P> The British East India Company (1600) and the Dutch East India Company (1602) launched an era of large state chartered trading companies . These companies were characterized by their monopoly on trade, granted by letters patent provided by the state . Recognized as chartered joint - stock companies by the state, these companies enjoyed power, ranging from lawmaking, military, and treaty - making privileges . Characterized by its colonial and expansionary powers by states, powerful nation - states sought to accumulate precious metals, and military conflicts arose . During this era, merchants, who had previously traded on their own, invested capital in the East India Companies and other colonies, seeking a return on investment . </P> <P> Mercantilism declined in Great Britain in the mid-18th century, when a new group of economic theorists, led by Adam Smith, challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines as the belief that the amount of the world's wealth remained constant and that a state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state . However, in more undeveloped economies, such as Prussia and Russia, with their much younger manufacturing bases, mercantilism continued to find favor after other states had turned to newer doctrines . </P> <P> The mid-18th century gave rise to industrial capitalism, made possible by (1) the accumulation of vast amounts of capital under the merchant phase of capitalism and its investment in machinery, and (2) the fact that the Enclosures meant that Britain had a large population of people with no access to subsistence agriculture, who needed to buy basic commodities via the market, thus ensuing a mass consumer market . Industrial capitalism, which Marx dated from the last third of the 18th century, marked the development of the factory system of manufacturing, characterized by a complex division of labor between and within work process and the routinization of work tasks; and finally established the global domination of the capitalist mode of production . </P>

What allowed england to establish more trade routes in the late medieval/early modern period