Commerce By A Frozen Sea

Commerce by a Frozen Sea is a cross-cultural study of a century of contact between North American native peoples and Europeans. During the eighteenth century, the natives of the Hudson Bay lowlands and their European trading partners were brought together by an increasingly popular trade in furs, destined for the hat and fur markets of Europe. Native Americans were the sole trappers of furs, which they traded to English and French merchants. The trade gave Native Americans access to new European technologies that were integrated into Indian lifeways. What emerges from this detailed exploration is a story of two equal partners involved in a mutually beneficial trade. Drawing on more than seventy years of trade records from the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company, economic historians Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis critique and confront many of the myths commonly held about the nature and impact of commercial trade. Extensively documented are the ways in which natives transformed the trading environment and determined the range of goods offered to them. Natives were effective bargainers who demanded practical items such as firearms, kettles, and blankets as well as luxuries like cloth, jewelry, and tobacco—goods similar to those purchased by Europeans. Surprisingly little alcohol was traded. Indeed, Commerce by a Frozen Sea shows that natives were industrious people who achieved a standard of living above that of most workers in Europe. Although they later fell behind, the eighteenth century was, for Native Americans, a golden age.

This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. Cosmopolitanism is not only a philosophical ideal: for many centuries it has also been an everyday practice across the globe. The early modern era saw hitherto unprecedented levels of economic interconnectedness. States, societies, and individuals reacted with a mixture of commercial idealism and commercial anxiety, seeking at once to exploit new opportunities for growth whilst limiting its disruptive effects. In highlighting the range of commercial cosmopolitan practices that grew out of early modern globalisation, the book demonstrates that it provided robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, the kind of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that Ulrich Beck has called for, chapters provide agency-centred evaluations of the risks and opportunities inherent in the ambiguous role of the cosmopolitan, who, often playing on and mobilising a number of identities, operated in between and outside of different established legal, social, and cultural systems. The book will be important reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of economic, global, and cultural history.

Cover -- Half title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Chapter One The Boundaries of Nature -- Chapter Two A New Ecology -- Chapter Three The Landscape of History -- Postscript The Theater of Insects -- Note on Sources -- Notes -- Index -- Acknowledgments

Discover how blockchain will facilitate a new currency that will transcend space and time Largely inspired by The Denationalization of Money by Fredrich Hayek, Money Without Boundaries’ ideological foundation is also inspired by economists and thought leaders like Milton Friedman and Irving Fisher, advancements in capital markets over the past 50 years, and the convergence of old and new technologies. Author Thomas J. Anderson explains how blockchain acts as the filter and the glue, making it all possible. Compared with other currencies, blockchain-managed money markets are more straightforward and transparent. It is easier to monitor, understand, and assess the quality of their "full-faith and credit." Money Without Boundaries shows how not only money, but also the process of borrowing and lending, will evolve to be conducted in a 100% trusted, secure, transparent, open architecture environment. Anderson begins with a history of money and discusses the rise of cryptocurrency, concluding with a comparison of decentralized money markets to all other alternatives. Money without Boundaries: • Demonstrates how blockchain technology allows full transparency • Explains how blockchain makes it possible for money to be fully commoditized • Explains how this fully market-based, decentralized, self-regulating system has vast implications throughout the global financial system • Shows how everyone will benefit when they have the opportunity to compete on “full faith in credit” If you are interested in cryptocurrency, money, monetary theory, or understanding how the applied uses of blockchain technology will change your everyday life, this is essential reading.

Money, often portrayed as a straightforward representation of market value, is also a political force, a technology for remaking space and population. This was especially true in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Canada, where money - in many forms - provided an effective means of disseminating colonial social values, laying claim to national space, and disciplining colonized peoples. Colonialism's Currency analyzes the historical experiences and interactions of three distinct First Nations - the Wendat of Wendake, the Innu of Mashteuiatsh, and the Moose Factory Cree - with monetary forms and practices created by colonial powers. Whether treaty payments and welfare provisions such as the paper vouchers favoured by the Department of Indian Affairs, the Canadian Dominion's standardized paper notes, or the "made beaver" (the Hudson's Bay Company's money of account), each monetary form allowed the state to communicate and enforce political, economic, and cultural sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their lands. Surveying a range of historical cases, Brian Gettler shows how currency simultaneously placed First Nations beyond the bounds of settler society while justifying colonial interventions in their communities. Testifying to the destructive and the legitimizing power of money, Colonialism's Currency is an intriguing exploration of the complex relationship between First Nations and the state.