To preserve and extend trade and influence, they built far-flung networks of commercial agents and consuls, like Cathalan, who could broker relations and information in and between foreign ports of call. During Cathalan's era, when trade and naval warfare expanded dramatically beyond Europe and into the Atlantic world, European and American polities regarded the networks of commerce as a rich resource for intelligence, international relations, and knowledge about the natural world. (1757-1820), to reexamine when, where, and how diplomacy and statecraft participated in the creation of long-distance medical relations and health policies.
Historians generally view the growth of global governance in disease control as the product of world capitalist expansion and empire building in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.