Exchanges

2021 ◽  
pp. 47-72
Author(s):  
Jagjeet Lally
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
North India ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Single Process ◽  
Political Structures

By tracing the flow of goods from sites of production to sites of consumption, this chapter shows that long-distance trade was made up of numerous exchanges. Closely examining these exchanges, it demonstrates how caravan trade integrated the lives of even relatively remote peasants and pastoralists—not to mention bureaucrats, bankers and craftsmen—into larger economic and political structures. In the eighteenth century, the hub of caravan trade in north India shifted to Multan in western Punjab, its environs the site of trade-related production and home to the kinsmen of the pastoralists who plied the caravan routes, and its cities containing the workshops of artisans and the business houses of north-Indian magnates heavily involved in long-distance exchange. By comparing similar but very separate phenomena in Punjab and Bengal, this chapter reveals that globalisation was not a single process but a multiplicity, and one that could create disconnection just as much as greater connectivity.

Town Building in North India, 1790–1830

1975 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. A. Bayly
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Urban Communities ◽  
East India Company ◽  
North India ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Large Populations ◽  
Town Building

The fate of urban centres in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India has attracted attention far in excess of their supposed importance as population centres. It is assumed that flourishing towns are an indicator of economic development and change in their hinterlands. Muslim historians traditionally laid stress on the opulence of towns as a gauge of the wealth of divisions of the Moghul Empire. Recently, Indian historians of the Medieval period have returned to the theme, claiming for the Moghul cities large populations, developed ‘industries’ and sophisticated credit systems. Throughout these works there is an implicit paralled drawn with the point it is suggested that far from being mere administrative centers and entrepots for ‘aristocratic’ long-distance trade, these cities were exchange marts for wealthy hinterlands where agreculturalists exchanged thier products of ‘urban industries’. It is but a short step to argue that these cities weakened by the anarchy of the eighteenth century, were finally ruined by the negligent commercial amorality of the East India Company. The claim by early British writers that the security of British rule encouraged the growth of urban communities in which merchants secured relief from the vexations of local potentates and innumerable minor transit duties is rejected This argument for town decline first revived by Professor Irfan Habib almost as a throwaway, has recently been followed by other younger Indian Marxist historians.

Berlin and Vienna

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-203
Author(s):  
Margaret C. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Personal Transformations ◽  
Political Structures ◽  
New Institutions

This epilogue argues that the meaning of the Enlightenment resides in political structures and personal transformations that emerged in the course of the eighteenth century. These are most visible in the lives and ideas found in its last quarter. Since the late 1680s into the 1790s, all sorts of people tried to break with tradition and find alternatives to absolutism in church and state. By 1800, space and time on earth were filled by fewer miracles, saints, and prophecies than had been the case in 1700. Ultimately, the eighteenth-century philosophes, despite their disagreements, shared a universal distrust of organized religion and the priests who enforced it. Indeed, the century ended with revolutions that focused minds on making new institutions, new laws, new hopes and dreams.

The Eastern Ports

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Erikson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Merchant Class ◽  
Commercial Networks ◽  
Political Structures

This chapter argues that the English Company was most successful in ports with a large local merchant class already adept at overseas trade. The captains were able to engage in trade because of preexisting financial and commercial networks that were willing and able to accommodate a large influx of small-scale commercial actors (factors, captains, officers, and seamen), as well as the larger interests of the Company itself. Overviews of foreign trade institutions, regulations, and practices at eight different ports of call—Batticaloa, Madras, New Guinea, Madagascar, Bantam (Banten), Whampoa (Huangpu, port of Guangzhou), Goa, and Batavia (Jakarta)—demonstrate this point. Each presents a window into the complex social and political structures of eighteenth-century Asian trading ports.

scholarly journals Dreams, songs and letters: Sectarian networks and musical archives in eighteenth-century North India

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-604
Author(s):  
Richard David Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
North India ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Musical Accompaniment

Early modern poets conventionally began their compositions by praising and invoking the blessings of their higher authorities, be they their gods, gurus or courtly patrons. In the eighteenth century, North Indian society was particularly unstable, and the relationships between these different power brokers proved volatile. This article considers how intellectuals attached to religious households navigated the challenges of the period, particularly invading armies, religious reforms and forced migration. I examine the works of Vrindavandas (c. 1700–87), a Brajbhasha poet and lay devotee of the Radhavallabh Sampraday, and provide contextualised readings of two of his poems, concerned with recent history and the contemporary political climate. Vrindavandas was not a scribe or chronicler in a conventional sense; however, closer examination of his works reveals the porous boundaries between scribes-cum-recorders and other kinds of intellectuals. Here, I consider how Vrindavandas’ literary activity included copying archival sources, recording recent history, documenting dreams and emotions, and folding different senses of temporality into a single work. This article asks how far his poetic works gesture to a distinctively eighteenth-century mode of literary expression and reflexivity, and how performing these poetic archives through reading, singing, and musical accompaniment provided the sect with tools to navigate a turbulent political landscape.

Decline and Renewal (1713–1750)

1997 ◽  
pp. 195-215
Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Steady Increase ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Relevant Factor ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Manufacturing Activity

This chapter explains that the period 1713–50 was one of sharp deterioration in European Jewry's demographic position. It is true that a steady increase persisted in many parts, but, from the second decade of the eighteenth century onwards, the population of Europe as a whole began to burgeon once more so that, other than in the eastern territories of Poland, Jewish population growth now lagged well behind that of the rest. Moreover, and a more immediately relevant factor in the economic and cultural decline of European Jewry during the eighteenth century, practically all the leading Jewish urban centres displayed a marked incapacity for growth. Previously, from 1570 down to 1713, the economic policies of the European states, concentrating on the promotion of long-distance commerce, had encouraged the increasing integration of the Jewish trade network into the European economy as a whole, and this had laid the basis for the revival of Jewish life in progress in central and western Europe since the late sixteenth century. After 1713, however, a less favourable trend set in. Whilst the European states were still ruled by mercantilist notions, they now adopted more comprehensively protectionist policies, concentrating on the promotion of manufacturing activity rather than long-distance trade.

Commemorating War in Eighteenth-Century China

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 869-899 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Waley-Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Qing Dynasty ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Qianlong Emperor

Reviewing his long reign in 1792, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736–1795) hailed his military triumphs as one of its central accomplishments. To underscore the importance he ascribed to these successes, he began to style himself ‘Old Man of the Ten Complete Victories’ (Shi Quan Lao Ren), after an essay in which he boldly declared he had surpassed, in ‘Ten Complete Military Victories’ (Shi Quan Wu Gong), the far-reaching westward expansions of the great Han (206 BCE–220 CE) and Tang (618–907) empires. Such an assertion, together with the program of commemoration discussed below, served to justify the immense expense incurred by frequent long-distance campaigning; to elevate all these wars to an unimpeachable level of splendor even though some were distinctly less glorious than others; and to align the Manchu Qing dynasty (16–191 i) with two of the greatest native dynasties of Chinese history and the Qianlong Emperor personally with some of the great figures of the past.

Appropriations and Contestations of the Islamic Nomenclature in Muslim North India

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-110
Author(s):  
Jan-Peter Hartung
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Semantic Field ◽  
Socioeconomic Groups ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Ruling Elites

This article comprises a twofold attempt: the first is to establish a semantic field that revolves around the concept of siyāsat—roughly equivalent to the political—in Muslim South Asia; the second is to trace semantic shifts in this field and to identify circumstances that may have prompted those shifts. It is argued here that the terms that constitute the semantic field of the political oscillate between two sociolinguistic traditions: a strongly Islamicate Arabic one, and a more imperially oriented Persian one. Another linguistic shift is indicated with the replacement of Persian by Urdu as the dominant literary idiom in and beyond North India since the eighteenth century. The aim is to serve only as a starting point for a more intensive discussion that brings in other materials and perspectives, thus helping to elucidate the tension between normative aspirations by ruling elites and actual political praxes by variant socioeconomic groups.

The Organisation of Global Trade: the Monopoly Companies, 1600–1800

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Emmer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Institutional Environment ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Small Companies ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth ◽  
Atlantic Economy

In the early modern period (1500–1800), shipping and trade within Europe were the domain of individual merchants and small companies organised on a temporary basis. Outside Europe, however, new financial and commercial institutions such as permanent joint stock companies came into existence in order to limit the risks. These large institutions played an important role in inter-continental trade and shipping, albeit that their role in Asia differed from that in the Atlantic, where small companies as well as individual merchants remained the dominant form of organisation. In addition, privateers played an important role in the Atlantic economy in times of war while piracy could flourish in those parts of the overseas world where the Iberian trade circuits bordered on those of France, England and the Dutch republic. The conclusion points to the fact that a direct link between the overseas expansion of Europe and its industrialisation might be difficult to construct, but that the creation of long distance trading companies created the institutional environment that must have facilitated Europe's rapid economic growth after the middle of the eighteenth century.

GLOBAL COMMERCE AND THE QUESTION OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PROVINCES

2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMMA ROTHSCHILD
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Science ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The North ◽  
Interesting Insight ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
Global Connections ◽  
Theories Of Sovereignty

The paper is concerned with disputes over sovereignty and global commerce in the 1760s and 1770s. The eighteenth-century revolution in economic science has been identified with agricultural reforms, and with the definition of national economies. The economists of the time, including Turgot, Mirabeau, Dupont de Nemours, Baudeau and Adam Smith, were also intensely interested in the merchant sovereigns of the French, English and Dutch East India companies, and in the new colonial ventures of the post-Seven Years War period. Their writings on global commerce were sometimes extraordinarily detailed (about herrings, for example, or bye-laws) and often untheoretical. Turgot was for a brief period minister of the navy and of the colonies. The older Mirabeau described the “Spaniard” as “the true Mogul of America,” and the cod of the North Atlantic as “the inexhaustible Peru of the Dutch.” But the economists’ writings on global connections were the occasion for some of their most profound reflections on the political consequences of laissez-faire, on theories of sovereignty, on the difficulties of transporting information or instructions over very large distances, and on the changing relationships between power, law and commerce. The disputes over long-distance commerce provide an interesting insight, the paper suggests, into ways of thinking which were at the same time scientific and administrative, global and provincial.

Financing Long-Distance Trade: The Joint Liability Rule and Bills of Exchange in Eighteenth-Century France

2015 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 690-719 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Aoki Santarosa
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Liability Rule ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Trade Finance ◽  
Joint Liability ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Fundamental Information ◽  
Bill Of Exchange

Over time, international trade expanded beyond the reach of an individual's personal networks. How was long-distance trade among strangers financed without using banks? I argue that the joint liability rule enabled the medieval bill of exchange to become a major form of payment and credit in the early modern period which in turn supported an unparalleled expansion of trade. This article empirically examines the role that joint liability played in ameliorating fundamental information problems in long-distance trade finance.

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