Goods from the East focuses on the fine product trade's first Global Age: how products were made, marketed and distributed between Asia and Europe between 1600 and 1800. It brings together established scholars as well as new, to provide a full comparative and connective study of this trade.

A 2006 investigation of the idea of the powerful Asian empires in the works of Milton, Dryden, Defoe and Swift.

The rivalry for trade in tea and textiles between the English and Dutch East India companies is very much a global history. This trade is strongly connected to emblematic events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution.

The book re-examines the field of Renaissance art history by exploring the art of this era in the light of global connections. It considers the movement of objects, ideas and technologies and its significance for European art and material culture, analysing images through the lens of cultural encounter and conflict.

Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible to scholars, students, researchers, and general readers. Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The books offered through Minnesota Archive Editions are produced in limited quantities according to customer demand and are available through select distribution partners.

The production, acquisition, and use of consumer goods defines our daily lives, and yet consumerism is seen as increasingly controversial. Movements for sustainable and ethical consumerism are gaining momentum alongside an awareness of how our choices in the marketplace can affect public issues. How did we get here? This volume advances a bold new interpretation of the 'consumer revolution' of the eighteenth century, when European elites, middling classes, and even certain labourers purchased unprecedented quantities of clothing, household goods, and colonial products. Michael Kwass adopts a global perspective that incorporates the expansion of European empires, the development of world trade, and the rise of plantation slavery in the Americas. Kwass analyses the emergence of Enlightenment material cultures, contentious philosophical debates on the morality of consumption, and new forms of consumer activism to offer a fresh interpretation of the politics of consumption in the age of abolitionism and the Atlantic Revolutions.

This book focuses on the significant role of West African consumers in the development of the global economy. It explores their demand for Indian cotton textiles and how their consumption shaped patterns of global trade, influencing economies and businesses from Western Europe to South Asia. In turn, the book examines how cotton textile production in southern India responded to this demand. Through this perspective of a south-south economic history, the study foregrounds African agency and considers the lasting impact on production and exports in South Asia. It also considers how European commercial and imperial expansion provided a complex web of networks, linking West African consumers and Indian weavers. Crucially, it demonstrates the emergence of the modern global economy.

Have Marxian ideas been relevant or influential in the writing and interpretation of history? What are the Marxist legacies that are now re-emerging in present-day histories? This volume is an attempt at relearning what the “discipline” of history once knew – whether one considered oneself a Marxist, a non-Marxist or an anti-Marxist.

Lisa Hellman offers the first study of European everyday life in Canton and Macao. How foreigners could live, communicate, move around – even whom they could interaction with – were all things strictly regulated by the Chinese authorities. The Europeans sometimes adapted to, and sometimes subverted, these rules. Focusing on this conditional domesticity shows the importance of gender relations, especially the construction of masculinity. Using the Swedish East India Company, a minor European actor in an expanding Asian empire, as a point of entry highlights the multiplicity of actors taking part in local negotiations of power. The European attempts at making a home in China contributes to a global turn in everyday history, but also to an everyday turn in global history.

From West Indian sugar and bottles of Southeast Asian arrack to French red wines, English felt cloth, and Mediterranean lemons, many global wares ended up in the Scandinavian borderlands during the late eighteenth century. This book explores how and why these goods came to be there and analyses what smuggling can reveal about the emergence of global trade, the formation of the nation state, and the development of consumer society in Europe’s northernmost outskirts. This book shows that the global underground was ubiquitous in the Nordic countries and fundamentally altered them, politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Through re-evaluating the role of smuggling the book complements and challenges established historical accounts about state building, market dynamics, consumer culture, and ideas and identity. It also offers a roadmap for how to think about illegal global trade and how to approach this notoriously difficult research field. By integrating illegality, the book aims to show how an illicit web entangled often overlooked ‘peripheral’ territories with traditional ‘portals of globalisation’ and proposes a novel take on early modern globalisation and the paths to modernity in the European hinterlands. To achieve this a wide variety of sources are used including court records, administrative sources, diaries, ambassadorial correspondence, and maps in various languages including Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, English, and French. This book makes a significant contribution to the literature on economic history, the first wave of globalisation, the study of shadow economies, and Scandinavian history more broadly.