Negotiating Trade: Commercial Institutions and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Medieval and Early Modern World: An Introduction

Mediaevalia ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Travis Bruce ◽  
Dana E. Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Modern World

The Pacific Borderlands of the Spanish Empire

2019 ◽  
pp. 764-788
Author(s):  
Catherine Tracy Goode
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Spanish Colonies ◽  
Asian Economy

This chapter explores the economic relationship between the Spanish colonies in the Americas and the Asian markets at the center of the early modern world economy. Pointing to the importance of political and family networks that existed within the Pacific borderlands, it investigates how Spanish merchants and bureaucrats supplied the sought-after silver to Asian markets in exchange for varied luxury goods like textiles, spices, porcelains, and furniture. The Manila Galleon functioned as the conduit, moving goods, people, and knowledge through the Pacific borderlands. These relationships across the Pacific, which were built on commerce but extended to political and cultural exchange, demonstrate that Spanish colonies that were far beyond the control of a European power benefitted from their direct access to the Asian economy across the Pacific.

CULTURES OF EXCHANGE: ATLANTIC AFRICA IN THE ERA OF THE SLAVE TRADE

2009 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 151-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Richardson
Keyword(s):  
Institutional Economics ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
New Institutional Economics ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
Culturally Based ◽  
Cultural Dialogue ◽  
Douglass North

ABSTRACTCultural factors have often been invoked to explain parliament's decision in 1807 to outlaw slave carrying by British subjects but they have only infrequently been cited in efforts to explain why the Atlantic slave trade itself became so large in the three centuries preceding 1807. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance by looking at ways in which inter-cultural dialogue between Africans and Europeans and related adjustments in social values and adaptations of African institutional arrangements may contribute to improving our understanding of the huge growth in market transactions in enslaved people in Atlantic Africa before 1807. In exploring such issues, the paper draws on important theoretical insights from new institutional economics, notably the work of Douglass North. It also attempts to show how institutionally and culturally based developments in transatlantic slave trafficking, the largest arena of cross-cultural exchange in the Atlantic world before 1850, may themselves help to promote understanding of the much broader historical processes that underpin economic change and the creation of the modern world.

Allegra Iafrate, The Long Life of Magical Objects: A Study in the Solomonic Tradition. The Magic in History Series. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019, xi, 235 pp., 19 b/w images, 2 tables.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 252-254
Author(s):  
Albrecht Classen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Modern World ◽  
State University ◽  
Eastern Culture ◽  
Historical Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Objects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Throughout times, magic and magicians have exerted a tremendous influence, and this even in our (post)modern world (see now the contributions to Magic and Magicians in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Time, ed. Albrecht Classen, 2017; here not mentioned). Allegra Iafrate here presents a fourth monograph dedicated to magical objects, primarily those associated with the biblical King Solomon, especially the ring, the bottle which holds a demon, knots, and the flying carpet. She is especially interested in the reception history of those symbolic objects, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, both in western and in eastern culture, that is, above all, in the Arabic world, and also pursues the afterlife of those objects in the early modern age. Iafrate pursues not only the actual history of King Solomon and those religious objects associated with him, but the metaphorical objects as they made their presence felt throughout time, and this especially in literary texts and in art-historical objects.

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
North West ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.

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