Producing Gold and Silver to Globalize the Economy during the Early Modern Era: San Luis Potosi and the Pacific Trade with Asia

This article presents evidence from archival sources that allows us to reconstruct the commercial networks that permitted the continuous flow of silver and gold from northern New Spain to Asia during the early modern era. These networks obtained various consumer goods – fabrics, spices, porcelain – that were then introduced into Spanish American markets. The narrative follows the bullion through its journey from the production center in San Luis Potosi to the Pacific and Asia. This vantage point contributes to the construction of a polycentric view within the framework of global history by assessing the role played by the American and Asiatic possessions of the Hispanic Empire in the first globalization. Using a methodological framework provided by social network analysis, the article presents a study of two commercial networks based in New Spain and extending to the Philippines and Peru. The essay underlines the role merchants played in mobilizing precious metals to accelerate exchanges and generate extraordinary profit margins.

New Social World: The Great Power of the Network

At the early beginning of the 21st century, it was impossible to imagine how fast the Internet would develop. It was also not obvious that the worldwide network would actually become available in all parts of the planet, and the network itself would become the basis for the birth and development of new global products - social networks, communications, and services. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the Internet and new digital products along twenty years have almost completely absorbed the population of developed countries (87%) and are growing rapidly in developing countries (47%)[1]. The affordable cost of communication for the majority of the population together with free communication services create the basis for the emergence of not only new products but also a constant increase in the number of digital services, which quite recently could only be obtained offline. Together with large digital government services, commercial networks, communicators, and services are creating a new social structure capable of independent machine learning and development. The work aims to show that much faster than it was supposed new digital products will intertwine with each other, forming a new social platform, which is called a New Social World. The analysis of sociological works on this topic together with an analysis of practical research on the Internet and new digital products confirms this assumption. Despite strict user agreements, global online monitoring, constant online control and full access to the data of each user, more and more people become users of social networks and services, and most social network users become loyal users of other new products and services, easily switching on digital consumption and consumption of real products and services provided online. The new social reality, generated by the powerful interweaving of the world's digital products and services will forever change the sociocultural and media world. An urgent and constant study of this phenomenon is necessary since the ways of its further development are unpredictable both in relation to the existence of traditional, social, national identification and with the existence of traditional state institutions and states.

Commercial Networks Connecting Southeast Asia with the Indian Ocean

Southeast Asian history has seen remarkable levels of mobility and durable connections with the rest of the Indian Ocean. The archaeological record points to prehistoric circulations of material culture within the region. Through the power of monsoon sailing, these small-scale circuits coalesced into larger networks by the 5th century bce. Commercial relations with Chinese, Indian, and West Asian traders brought great prosperity to a number of Southeast Asian ports, which were described as places of immense wealth. Professional shipping, facilitated by local watercraft and crews, reveals the indigenous agency behind such long-distance maritime contacts. By the second half of the first millennium ce, ships from the Indo-Malayan world could be found as far west as coastal East Africa. Arabic and Persian merchants started to play a larger role in the Indian Ocean trade by the 8th century, importing spices and aromatic tree resins from sea-oriented polities such as Srivijaya and later Majapahit. From the 15th century, many coastal settlements in Southeast Asia embraced Islam, partly motivated by commercial interests. The arrival of Portuguese, Dutch, and British ships increased the scale of Indian Ocean commerce, including in the domains of capitalist production systems, conquest, slavery, indentured labor, and eventually free trade. During the colonial period, the Indian Ocean was incorporated into a truly global economy. While cultural and intellectual links between Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean have persisted in the 21st century, commercial networks have declined in importance.

On the Rollout of Network Slicing in Carrier Networks: A Technology Radar

Network slicing is a powerful paradigm for network operators to support use cases with widely diverse requirements atop a common infrastructure. As 5G standards are completed, and commercial solutions mature, operators need to start thinking about how to integrate network slicing capabilities in their assets, so that customer-facing solutions can be made available in their portfolio. This integration is, however, not an easy task, due to the heterogeneity of assets that typically exist in carrier networks. In this regard, 5G commercial networks may consist of a number of domains, each with a different technological pace, and built out of products from multiple vendors, including legacy network devices and functions. These multi-technology, multi-vendor and brownfield features constitute a challenge for the operator, which is required to deploy and operate slices across all these domains in order to satisfy the end-to-end nature of the services hosted by these slices. In this context, the only realistic option for operators is to introduce slicing capabilities progressively, following a phased approach in their roll-out. The purpose of this paper is to precisely help designing this kind of plan, by means of a technology radar. The radar identifies a set of solutions enabling network slicing on the individual domains, and classifies these solutions into four rings, each corresponding to a different timeline: (i) as-is ring, covering today’s slicing solutions; (ii) deploy ring, corresponding to solutions available in the short term; (iii) test ring, considering medium-term solutions; and (iv) explore ring, with solutions expected in the long run. This classification is done based on the technical availability of the solutions, together with the foreseen market demands. The value of this radar lies in its ability to provide a complete view of the slicing landscape with one single snapshot, by linking solutions to information that operators may use for decision making in their individual go-to-market strategies.

Socioeconomic and Cultural Importance of The Yellow-Fronted Canary (Serinus Mozambicus) in Northern Benin

The species yellow-fronted canary undergoes a real traffic due to its song and medico-magical properties in order to supply local commercial networks. This study aims to assess the socioeconomic and cultural importance of this bird in order to identify the cohorts of actors involved along this activity chain. In this context a survey was carried out among 400 breeders in four agroecological zones of Benin (ZAE II; ZAE III, ZAE IV and ZAE V). The questionnaire also focused on general characteristics of the respondents on aspects related to general knowledge of the bird, its social importance, purchase and sale price, cultural importance and breeders’ perceptions. Canary traders, mostly with primary education level (63.25%) and Muslim (97.5%), were on average 44 years old and an average experience of 27 years. They exercised this activity in part-time (96.5%). The knowledge about canary is shared is different depending on the ethnic group. The activity was profitable for all of them (100%) with 128,624 FCFA (233.18 USD) net profit per month. The trader's education level, whether or not he belonged to ZAE II, the number of birds he had in his possession, the daily amount he invested in their food, their selling price, the number of years he made the activity, his experience in the business were the factors that determine the net profit of the canary’s trader. However, canaries' breeding in north-Benin is based on a complex system with actors who develop many myths around medico-magical practices. This study was necessary to better assess the pressure on the species in order to anticipate its conservation.

Henry Dundas: A ‘Great Delayer’ of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Henry Dundas, first viscount Melville (1742–1811), lord advocate in Scotland, MP for Edinburgh and Midlothian, first lord of the admiralty, home secretary and the first secretary of state for war, was one of the most powerful politicians in the eighteenth-century British parliament. His involvement in the gradual abolition of the slave trade after 1792 was amongst the most controversial episodes of his career. His role has attracted much interest in the last few years, although there are two irreconcilable schools of thought amongst historians. This article reassesses Dundas's role in the gradual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. His contributions in the houses of parliament between 1791 and 1807 are examined and situated in the appropriate imperial context. Memoirs and published pamphlets reveal how contemporaries viewed Dundas's activities and motives at the time and since. His parliamentary activities are compared with new insights from his personal correspondence as well as public and private communications from West India societies, merchants and planters. By overlaying parliamentary events with commercial networks, Henry Dundas's collaboration with the West India interest is revealed, and how this operated and was perceived at the time. This article—the first detailed study of its type—thus illuminates Henry Dundas's role as a great delayer of the abolition of the slave trade.

5G for the Support of Public Safety Services

Next-generation mobile technologies are the enablers for meeting the variable specific requirements of the public safety (PS) community. In particular, due to the development of commercially deployed 5G networks, PS providers look for ways to implement related solutions upon such infrastructures, potentially in a shared use with existing commercial networks. In particular, LTE and 5G NR networks are rapidly gaining recognition as an all-inclusive critical communications platform for the delivery of both mission and business critical applications. Within this scope, we take into account the innovative architectural approach that has been proposed by the 5G ESSENCE project, addressing the paradigms of edge computing and small cell as-a-service that has been realised via a cloud-enabled small cell infrastructure leveraging multi-access technologies in 5G, where we propose a dedicated PS use case, able to offer a mission critical push-to-talk service as well as a Chat and Localisation service. Each one of these services is associated to a dedicated network slice within the scope of the corresponding fundamental 5G ESSENCE architecture and both services are provided via suitable VNFs, thus offering great flexibility to serve PS needs together. We further discuss the overall scenario deployment with the related technical enablers and the proposed functionalities, per case. The corresponding end-to-end slicing makes possible to allocate both radio and cloud resources to the involved critical actors, in an automated and elastic way.

Sole Traders? The Role of the Extended Family in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Business Networks

Despite significant developments in understanding the role of women in early-modern business, more is needed to fully understand women’s impact on eighteenth-century trading networks. Further, much less is known about the role of wider family members, especially children, in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. The formal documentation that is privileged in business histories does not tell the whole story, and it frequently represents mercantile activity as a pursuit dominated by a patriarch at the center of a trading network. This article explores eighteenth-century familial commercial networks through extensive use of the personal family correspondence of three merchant families who lived and traded within different locales of the northern Atlantic: Hugh Hall, a merchant and vice judge of the admiralty in Barbados; the Black family, who were wine merchants in Bordeaux; and Joseph Symson, a mercer and shopkeeper from Kendal, England. This article will show that women appear as autonomous players with the power and ability to make informed and independent decisions that directed the business interests of their families. Moreover, it includes an assessment of the ways in which merchants cultivated the expertise of their extended families to enhance their commercial networks and advance their business pursuits. Focusing on children who supported or enhanced the prosperity of the family firm, this article emphasizes that their participation was intentional, not incidental. This article asks questions about the emotional consequences of such activity—which have rarely been considered in any detail—as well as the financial benefit of operating in this manner.