Combining strikingly new scholarship by art historians, historians, and ethnomusicologists, this interdisciplinary volume illuminates trade ties within East Asia, and from East Asia outwards, in the years 1550 to 1800. While not encyclopedic, the selected topics greatly advance our sense of this trade picture. Throughout the book, multi-part trade structures are excavated; the presence of European powers within the Asian trade nexus features as part of this narrative. Visual goods are highlighted, including lacquerwares, paintings, prints, musical instruments, textiles, ivory sculptures, unfired ceramic portrait figurines, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and SoutheastAsian ceramic vessels. These essays underscore the significance of Asian industries producing multiples, and the rhetorical charge of these goods, shifting in meaning as they move. Everyday commodities are treated as well; for example, the trans-Pacific trade in contraband mercury, used in silver refinement, is spelled out in detail. Building reverberations between merchant networks, trade goods, and the look of the objects themselves, this richly-illustrated book brings to light the Asian trade engine powering the early modern visual cultures of East and Southeast Asia, the American colonies, and Europe.

Tamara H. Bentley is Professor of Asian Art History at Colorado College in the United States. She has published a book on the Chinese 17th century painter and printmaker Chen Hongshou, and she also writes about art and international trade.

Chapter One: People and Things in Motion: The View from the Eastby Tamara H. BentleyI: CIRCUITS AND EXCHANGESChapter Two: The Maritime Trading World of East Asia from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries by Richard von GlahnChapter Three: The Junk Trade and Hokkien Merchant Networksin Maritime Asia: 1570“1760 by James K. ChinChapter Four: The Trade Activities of 16th century Christian Daimyo Otomo Sorinby Hiroko NishidaII: COMMODITIESChapter Five: From Global to Local: The Diaspora of Asian Decorative Artsin Colonial Latin America by Donna PierceChapter Six: Trans-Pacific Connections: Contraband Mercury Trade in the 16th to early 18th Century by Angela SchottenhammerChapter Seven: Ÿthe Features are Esteem’d very justŒ: Chinese Unfired Clay Portrait Figures of Westerners by William R. SargentIII: HYBRID AESTHETICSChapter Eight: The Global Keyboard: Music, Visual Forms,and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Era by Victoria LevineChapter Nine Barbarian Tropes Framed Anew: Three Qing Dynasty Chinese Lacquer Screens of Europeans Hunting by Tamara H. BentleyChapter Ten: Chinese Porcelain, the East India Company and British Cultural Identity, 1600-1800 by Stacey Pierson