India in the early modern world economy: modes of production, reproduction and exchange

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Washbrook
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Commercial Development ◽  
Indian Economy ◽  
Leading Role

India played a leading role in the growth of the early modern world economy. Yet its historiography has been dominated by forebodings of the colonial conquest and decline, which were to overtake it at the end of the eighteenth century. This essay seeks to explore the strengths rather than weaknesses of the Indian economy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries when the goods which it produced were in heavy demand in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. However, it also points to ways in which specific features of India’s commercial development created vulnerabilities to conquest from overseas, which would be exploited later on.

Qing Connections to the Early Modern World: Ethnography and Cartography in Eighteenth-Century China

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 623-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA HOSTETLER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Literary Sources

‘Consulting literary sources is not as satisfactory as observation . . . If one wants to control the barbarian frontier area, one must judge the profitability of the land, and investigate the nature of its people.’—Qian Shu‘If one does not differentiate between their varieties, or know their customs, then one has not what it takes to appreciate their circumstances, and to govern them.’—‘Miaoliao tushuo’

The Politics of Trade and Power: Dahir al-Umar and the Making of Early Modern Palestine

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 696-736
Author(s):  
Mahmoud Yazbak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
World Economy ◽  
The West ◽  
Merchant Class

Abstract When Shaykh Dahir al-ʿUmar al-Zaydani died in 1775, he had ruled large parts of Palestine for over half a century. Capitalizing on the forward economy introduced by the Dutch merchant “gone native,” Paul Maashoek (d. 1711), Dahir created a politics of trade and power that brought about the economic flourishing of Palestine and the prosperity of its population for most of the eighteenth century. From his urbanization of the Galilee’s main villages, Tiberias, Nazareth, Acre and Haifa, sprang the merchant class whose subsequent active trading with the West helped quicken the pace of Palestine’s integration into the Europe-dominated world economy.

Knowledge and divergence from the perspective of early modern India

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Cost

AbstractThis article explores the origins of divergent technological pathways in the early modern world, and the role that artisanal knowledge played in this process. It rejects older explanations based on societal differences in entrepreneurial propensities and incentives, and a more modern one based on factor cost. It argues instead for the importance of conditions that facilitated transactions between complementary skills. In India, the institutional setting within which artisan techniques were learned had made such transactions less likely than in eighteenth-century Europe. The cost of acquiring knowledge, therefore, was relatively high in India.

Economic Conditions in Early Modern Bengal: A Contribution to the Divergence Debate

2010 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Income Growth ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Average Income ◽  
European Colonization

This article contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that in contemporary Western Europe, and (b) there is insufficient basis to infer either growth or decline in average income in the eighteenth century.

Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China? A Review of Kenneth Pomeranz'sThe Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 501-538 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip C. C. Huang
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World Economy ◽  
New World ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Population History ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Delta Area ◽  
Coal Resources ◽  
Great Divergence ◽  
Eighteenth Century Britain

Kenneth pomeranz argues that “the great divergence” between development and involution in Europe and China did not occur until after 1800. Until then, Europe and China were comparable in population history, agriculture, handicraft industry, income, and consumption. Europe before 1800, in other words, was much less developed than the last two decades of scholarship have led us to believe, while China before 1800 was much less involuted. To make his case, Pomeranz spotlights England, the most advanced part of Europe, and the Yangzi delta area, the most advanced part of China. They diverged only after 1800, mainly because of the lucky availability of coal resources for England, and also of other raw materials from the New World.

The Smugglers' World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Cromwell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Modern World ◽  
French Caribbean ◽  
Illicit Trade ◽  
Political Protests ◽  
Moral Necessity

The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela reinterprets the meaning of illicit commerce in the early modern Atlantic. More than simply a transactional relationship or a political economy concern of empires, smuggling became a societal ethos for the communities in which it was practiced. For most of the colonial period, subjects of the commercially neglected province of Venezuela depended on contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean. These illegal yet scarcely patrolled rendezvous came under scrutiny in the eighteenth century as Bourbon reformers sought to regain control and boost productivity in the province. Subsequent crackdowns on smuggling sparked colonial tensions. Illicit trade created interimperial connections and parallel communities based around provisioning as a moral necessity. It threw the legal status of people of color aboard ships into chaos. Smuggling’s participants normalized subversions of imperial law and proffered mutually agreed-upon limits of acceptable extralegal activity. Venezuelan subjects defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures and occasionally through violent political protests. This commercial discourse between the state and its subjects was a key part of empire making and maintenance in the early modern world.

scholarly journals Sanctifying Domestic Space and Domesticating Sacred Space: Reading Ziyāra and Taṣliya in Light of the Domestic in the Early Modern Ottoman World

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Parkes Allen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Physical Evidence

Shrine-visitation (ziyāra) and devotion to Muḥammad (such as expressed in taṣliya, the uttering of invocations upon the Prophet), both expressed through a range of ritualized practices and material objects, were at the heart of everyday Islam for the vast majority of early modern Ottoman Muslims across the empire. While both bodies of practice had communal and domestic aspects, this article focuses on the important intersections of the domestic with both shrine-visitation and Muḥammad-centered devotion as visible in the early modern Ottoman lands, with a primary emphasis on the eighteenth century. While saints’ shrines were communal and ‘public’ in nature, a range of attitudes and practices associated with them, recoverable through surviving physical evidence, travel literature, and hagiography, reveal their construction as domestic spaces of a different sort, appearing to pious visitors as the ‘home’ of the entombed saint through such routes as wall-writing, gender-mixing, and dream encounters. Devotion to Muḥammad, on the other hand, while having many communal manifestations, was also deeply rooted in the domestic space of the household, in both prescription and practice. Through an examination of commentary literature, hagiography, and imagery and objects of devotion, particularly in the context of the famed manual of devotion Dalā’il al-khayrāt, I demonstrate the transformative effect of such devotion upon domestic space and the ways in which domestic contexts were linked to the wider early modern world, Ottoman, and beyond.

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