Mining Money And Markets In The Early Modern Atlantic

This volume documents recent efforts to track the transformation and trajectory of silver during the early modern period, from its origins in ores located on either side of the Atlantic to its use as currency in the financial centres of continental Europe. As a point of comparison, copper mining and its monetary use in the early modern Atlantic World will also be considered. Contributors rely mainly on economic and economic history methodologies, complemented by geographical and cultural history approaches. The use of novel software applications as tools to explain economic-historical episodes is also detailed.

This book offers a new perspective on the concept of modernity. Since its invention as a contrast to Antiquity or the Middle Ages, modernity has been tied to ideas of superiority, progress, and efficiency. As a counterpart to the Marxist “history of class struggle”, “modernization theories” have transformed modernity into an almost teleological concept of historical development. These strong connotations obstruct a clear look at other forms of modernity. The contributions of the volume will show in a comparative perspective how modernity can also be understood and analyzed as multiple responses of societies and polities to organize themselves in facing ever more complex and integrated interactions at ever larger scales.

"Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodities history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local and global historical analysis. This Oxford Handbook features contributions from scholars involved in these developments across a range of countries and linguistic regions. They discuss the state of the art in their fields, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research. Each of its 31 chapters focuses on an important thematic area within commodities history: key approaches, global histories, modes of production, people and land, environmental impact, consumption, and new methodologies. Taken together, the Oxford Handbook of Commodities History offers insight into the directions in which commodities history is heading, and the multiple ways in which it can contribute to a better understanding of the world"--

In this second edition of The Rise of Western Power, Jonathan Daly retains the broad sweep of his introduction to the history of Western civilization as well as introducing new material into every chapter, enhancing the book's global coverage and engaging with the latest historical debates. The West's history is one of extraordinary success: no other region, empire, culture, or civilization has left so powerful a mark upon the world. Daly charts the West's achievements-representative government, the free enterprise system, modern science, and the rule of law-as well as its misdeeds: two World Wars, the Holocaust, imperialistic domination, and the Atlantic slave trade. Taking us through a series of revolutions, he explores the contributions of other cultures and civilizations to the West's emergence, weaving in historical, geographical, and cultural factors. The new edition also contains more material on themes such as the environment and gender, and additional coverage of India, China and the Islamic world. Daly's engaging narrative is accompanied by timelines, maps and further reading suggestions, along with a companion website featuring study questions, over 100 primary sources and 60 historical maps to enable further study.

Regulating Knowledge in an Entangled World uses case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to study knowledge transfer in early modern knowledge societies. In the early modern period the scale, intensity, and reach of exchange exploded. This volume develops a historicised understanding of knowledge transfer to shed new light on these fundamental changes. By looking at the preconditions of knowledge transfer, it shifts the focus from the objects circulating to the interactions by which they circulate and the way actors cement their relations. The novelty of this approach shows how rules and regulations were enablers of knowledge circulation, rather than impediments. The chapters identify changing patterns of knowledge transfer in cases such as sixteenth-century Venice, the Spanish Empire in the Americas, continental Habsburg, early seventeenth-century Dutch at sea, and the Offices of the Catholic Church. Through the perspective of ‘regulating’, this volume advances the historiography of knowledge circulation by forging a new combination of histories of circulation and of institutions. By bringing together historians from intellectual history, economic history, book history, the history of science, religion, art, and material culture, this volume is useful for students and scholars interested in early modern knowledge societies and changing patterns of knowledge transfer.

This book presents an unusual view on one of the most influential periods in world economic history: the Early Globalization. By this term, the notion that a process of genuine globalization took place in the Early Modern Era is defended. The authors propose that the canonical globalization—that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—was preceded by a century-long increasing economic integration between continents that were non-existent before 1492. The economic aspects of the Early Globalization, like market integration, price co-movements and international silver circulation, were very important. Notwithstanding, other dimensions of human life, which were affected by unprecedented intercontinental contacts, including free and forced migrations, changes in tastes and consumption, etc. The Fruits of Globalisation deals with some of the most important issues among the former and the latter. The book combines approaches from different disciplines, including quantitative and non-quantitative economic history, econometrics, international trade and demography. Overall, the vision of the Early Globalisation offered in this book is less pessimistic than in mainstream literature on the period.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. This book examines the European commercial landscape of the early China trade, c.1700–1750. It looks at the foundational period of Sino-European commerce and explores a world of private enterprise beneath the surface of the official East India Company structures. Using rich private trade records, it analyses the making of pan-European markets, distribution networks and patterns of investment that together reveal a new geography of a trading system previously studied mostly at Canton. By considering the interloping activities of British-born merchants working for the smaller East India Companies, the book uncovers the commercial practices and cross-Company collaborations, both legal and illicit, that sustained the growth of the China trade: smuggling, wholesale trading, private commissions and the manipulation of Company auctions.

The papers in this edited volume discuss key elements of monetarism, including coin denominations, the role of bullion and case studies of substitute moneys.