Introduction

Author(s):  
Molly A. Warsh

Pearls call to mind a simple, feminine beauty in the modern imagination, but this was not always the case. In the early modern period, they evoked the excitement and uncertainty of distant places and unfamiliar peoples. Pearls were one of the earliest sources of American wealth to be exploited by the Spanish and their associates in the wake of Columbus’s voyages; the Venezuelan pearl fisheries provided critical lessons in the meaning of maritime empire. The webs of free and unfree labor that produced this early Caribbean pearl bonanza embedded the Americas in global networks of migration and commerce.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Katharina Grasskamp

During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells’ shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.


2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 165-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonio Andrade

AbstractWhy did Europeans rather than other Eurasians build the world’s first global empires, extending a measure of control, however fragile and contingent, over the oceans of the world? This article suggests that the best place to find an answer to the question is not in Europe but in Asia. Europeans were not alone in creating overseas empires in the early modern period, but the Asian counterparts to the Portuguese, Dutch, and English Empires are little known. Focusing on two of those Asian examples—the Ya’rubi Dynasty of Oman and the Zheng maritime empire of China—the author suggests that although European technology did confer an advantage on European mariners, it was not an insuperable advantage. Asian powers could adopt and adapt European cannons, ships, and nautical charts and beat the Europeans at their own game. Indeed, he suggests, this intra-Eurasian borrowing is a key process of history over the longue durée.


Author(s):  
Ines G. Županov

Indian historiography commonly treated Iberian imperial presence in South Asia in the early modern period as a precocious and unsuccessful effort before that of the British Empire. The Portuguese (and Spanish) Estado da Índia had indeed been an exemplary “borderlands” empire. However, its territorial marginality and the ultimate failure to expand did not hamper it from acquiring a prodigious “empire of knowledge.” By centering on three categories of knowledge—medico-botanical, linguistic, and historical—this article addresses the ways of knowing, collecting, and crafting information in transcultural dialogue with local communities. It focuses on mapping the major sites and intersections through which the knowledge circulated in the Portuguese imperial global networks. In addition, this article argues that these devalued, “borderlands” epistemologies inspired in important ways both British Empire and the major disciplinary fields (linguistics, area studies, history, Orientalism) engaged in reflecting on South Asia.


Author(s):  
Susanne Lachenicht

For the process of European expansion and the colonial endeavors from the late 15th century to the 19th, historians of the Atlantic world have more often than not identified the imperial states as the most powerful players: the Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, and English (later British). From these empires’ perspectives, colonization was also about converting the “heathen” to, first, Catholicism, and then, with the Reformation and the rise of different varieties of Protestantism, to other denominations as well. Colonization in the early modern period was as much about religious missions, about “the harvest of souls,” as it was about expanding territorial boundaries and economic resources (Lachenicht, et al. 2016, cited under General Overviews). What Lauric Henneton has dubbed the “spiritual geopolitics” of the Atlantic world (Henneton 2014, cited under Puritan Colonization Schemes) is an important feature in the conquest and colonization of the Atlantic world. While Catholic and Protestant institutions supported the imperial powers’ colonization schemes, the former had agendas of their own, which at times clashed with more worldly colonization schemes. Among the most powerful of these religious enterprises, we find next to the Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Capuchins a number of Protestant churches and communities. This is especially true for the later 17th and 18th centuries with so-called evangelical Protestantisms: Quakers, Halle Pietists, Moravians, and others. Many of these religious orders and communities had not only Atlantic but global networks that stretched from European to African, American, and Asian worlds—in the 19th century also to areas within the Pacific including Australia and New Zealand. In the early modern period, many religious minorities were heavily persecuted for their faith. Forced to migrate, a number of imperial states decided to “make use” of these religious minorities to populate their overseas colonies, to strengthen their might and prosperity. Tolerance, then, was about “suffering” the “religious other”—and about utilitarian motives that included colonization schemes (Lachenicht 2017, cited under General Overviews). Not only Sephardi Jews but also Huguenots, Quakers, Moravians, and others became—as Jonathan Israel has put it for Sephardi Jews—“agents and victims of empire” (Israel 2002, cited under Sephardi Jews and Colonization).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Grasskamp

During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells' shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.


2012 ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
O. Volkova

The article describes the evolution of accounting from the simple registration technique to economic and social institution in medieval Italy. We used methods of institutional analysis and historical research. It is shown that the institutionalization of accounting had been completed by the XIV century, when it became a system of codified technical standards, scholar discipline and a professional field. We examine the interrelations of this process with business environment, political, social, economic and cultural factors of Italy by the XII—XVI centuries. Stages of institutionalization are outlined.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-50
Author(s):  
Camilla Russell

The Jesuit missions in Asia were among the most audacious undertakings by Europeans in the early modern period. This article focuses on a still relatively little understood aspect of the enterprise: its appointment process. It draws together disparate archival documents to recreate the steps to becoming a Jesuit missionary, specifically the Litterae indipetae (petitions for the “Indies”), provincial reports about missionary candidates, and replies to applicants from the Jesuit superior general. Focusing on candidates from the Italian provinces of the Society of Jesus, the article outlines not just how Jesuit missionaries were appointed but also the priorities, motivations, and attitudes that informed their assessment and selection. Missionaries were made, the study shows, through a specific “way of proceeding” that was negotiated between all parties and seen in both organizational and spiritual terms, beginning with the vocation itself, which, whether the applicant departed or not, earned him the name indiano.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document