Merchant Cultures : A Global Approach to Spaces, Representations and Worlds of Trade, 1500?1800

Hans Holbein’s Triumphs (1532-1534), commissioned for the headquarters of the Hanseatic League in London and Kano Naizen’s The Portuguese namban (‘foreigners’) painted in 1543 in Japan are representations of worlds of trade, where wealth, speculation, exploitation, poverty, curiosity, encounters and the exotic relate effortlessly. These worlds multiplied in Africa, the America’s, Asia and Europe as mercantile cultures met in a globalizing world. From these encounters, power, subjugation and conflict arose as part of the same world as cooperation, cross-culturalism and cosmopolitism. Understanding early modern merchant cultures is thus paramount to comprehend the sinews of globalization before 1800.

Merchants worldwide shared trading interests. These interests shaped a panoply of encounters of mercantile cultures across space and time. This book sketches the commonalities and underlines the differences of mercantile practices and representations during the Early Modern period.

Contributors are: Laurence Fontaine, David Graizbord, William Pettigrew, Edmond J. Smith, Radhika Seshan, Rila Mukherjee, Jurre J. A. Knoest, Noelle Richardson, Joseph P. McDermott, Mark Harberlëin, Francisco Bethencourt, Edgar Pereira, and Germano Maifreda.

Cátia Antunes is Professor of Global Economic Networks: Merchants, Entrepreneurs and Empires at the Institute for History at Leiden University. She is currently the principal investigator of the project Exploiting the Empire of Others supported by the Dutch Research Council.

Francisco Bethencourt is Charles Boxer Professor of History at King’s College London. He is the author of The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478–1834 (Cambridge, 2009). In 2017 he organised the exhibition Racism and Citizenship in Lisbon. He is completing a new monograph entitled New Christian Trading Elite, Fifteenth–Eighteenth Century. His long-term research project is on the history of social inequality in the world.