1st Edition

Commercial Cosmopolitanism? Cross-Cultural Objects, Spaces, and Institutions in the Early Modern World

Edited By Felicia Gottmann Copyright 2021
278 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

278 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

278 Pages 16 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. Cosmopolitanism is not only a philosophical ideal: for many centuries it has also been an everyday practice across the globe. The early modern era saw hitherto unprecedented levels of economic interconnectedness. States, societies, and... Read more

Introduction: Commercial Cosmopolitanism? Transcultural Actors, Objects, Spaces, and Practices in the Early Modern World

Felicia Gottmann

Part 1: Cosmopolitan Spaces, Objects, and Actors 

1. Controlling the Golden Geese: Canton, Nagasaki and the Limits of Hybridity

Lisa Hellman

2. Trouble in the Contact Zone: Jeremias van Vliet in seventeenth-century Ayutthaya

Sven Trakulhun

3. Chinese Commercial Cosmopolitanism in the Eighteenth-Century Mekong River Delta: The Case of Mạc Thiên Tứ

Xing Hang

4. Money Talks: Confessions of a Disgraced Cosmopolitan Coin of the 1640s

Kris Lane

5. ‘This Whole Business Should Be Kept Very Secret’: The English Tobacco Workhouses in Moscow

Matthew P. Romaniello

6. Goods from the Sea Countries: Material Cosmopolitanism in Atlantic West Africa

Bronwen Everill

7. From the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic: The Nineteenth-Century Commercial Ventures of Oman-Zanzibar

Jeremy Prestholdt

Part 2: Institutions, Practices, and Agents

8. Hats, Furs and Native Traders in a Global Trade

Ann M. Carlos

9. The Social Networks of Cosmopolitan Fraudsters: The Prussian Bengal Company as a Transnational Corporation

Felicia Gottmann

10. Quasi-cosmopolitanism: French Directors in Ouidah and Pondicherry (1674-1746)

Elisabeth Heijmans

11. Commercial Cosmopolitanism? The Case of the Firm De Bruijn & Cloots (Lisbon) in the 18th century

Cátia Antunes, Susana Münch Miranda, and João Paulo Salvado

12. 'The Limits of Cosmopolitanism: Ottoman Algiers in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Michael Talbot

13. Making Ireland Poor: Poverty, Trade and Sectarianism in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic

James Livesey

Biography

Felicia Gottmann is Senior Lecturer in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. She is the author of Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680-1760 (2016) and, with Maxine Berg et al. editor of Goods from the East, 1600-1800: trading Eurasia (2015). She held Fellowships at the Universities of Harvard, Warwick, Dundee, and Oxford, and is PI of the UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship Project ‘Migration, Adaptation, Innovation 1500–1800’.