Maxine Berg

Felicia Gottmann

Hanna Hodacs

Chris Nierstrasz

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.

Trading Eurasia

Goods from the East, 1600-1800

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 individuals reacted with a mixture of commercial idealism and commercial anxiety, seeking at once to exploit new opportunities for growth whilst limiting its disruptive effects. In highlighting the range of commercial cosmopolitan practices that grew out of early modern globalisation, the book demonstrates that it provided robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of interdisciplinary methodologies, the kind of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ that Ulrich Beck has called for, chapters provide agency-centred evaluations of the risks and opportunities inherent in the ambiguous role of the cosmopolitan, who, often playing on and mobilising a number of identities, operated in between and outside of different established legal, social, and cultural systems. The book will be important reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of economic, global, and cultural history.

Felicia Gottmann

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