Results by title
173 books match the query 'Commerce' and 46 start with t
Temporarily Yours
Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of SexElizabeth Bernstein
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Drawing upon dynamic and innovative research with sex workers, their clients, and state actors, Bernstein argues that in cities such as San Francisco, Stockholm, and Amstersdam, the nature of what is purchased in commercial sexual encounters is also new. Rather than the expedient exchange of cash for sexual relations, what sex workers are increasingly paid to offer their clients is an erotic experience premised upon the performance of authentic interpersonal connection. As such, contemporary sex markets are emblematic of a cultural moment in which the boundaries between intimacy and commerce—and between public life and private—have been radically redrawn. Not simply a compelling exploration of the changing landscape of sex-work, Temporarily Yours ultimately lays bare the intimate intersections of political economy, desire, and culture.
Teotihuacan and Early Classic Mesoamerica
Multiscalar Perspectives on Power, Identity, and Interregional RelationsClaudia García-Des Lauriers
University Press of Colorado, 2021
The volume offers a multiscalar view of power and identity, showing that the spread of Teotihuacan-related material culture may have resulted from direct and indirect state administration, colonization, emulation by local groups, economic transactions, single-event elite interactions, and various kinds of social and political alliances. The contributors explore questions concerning who interacted with whom; what kinds of materials and ideas were exchanged; what role interregional interactions played in the creation, transformation, and contestation of power and identity within the city and among local polities; and how interactions on different scales were articulated. The answers to these questions reveal an Early Classic Mesoamerican world engaged in complex economic exchanges, multidirectional movements of goods and ideas, and a range of material patterns that require local, regional, and macroregional contextualization.
Focusing on the intersecting themes of identity and power, Teotihuacan and Early Classic Mesoamerica makes a strong contribution to the understanding of the role of this important metropolis in the Early Classic history of the region. The volume will be of interest to scholars and graduate students of Mesoamerican archaeology, the archaeology of interaction, and the archaeology of identity.
Contributors: Sarah C. Clayton, Fiorella Fenoglio Limón, Agapi Filini, Julie Gazzola, Sergio Gómez-Chávez, Haley Holt Mehta, Carmen Pérez, Patricia Plunket, Juan Carlos Saint Charles Zetina, Yoko Sugiura, Gabriela Uruñuela, Gustavo Jaimes Vences
The Ancient Maya Marketplace
The Archaeology of Transient SpaceEdited by Eleanor M. King
University of Arizona Press, 2015
The Ancient Maya Marketplace reviews the debate on Maya markets and offers compelling new evidence for the existence and identification of ancient marketplaces in the Maya Lowlands. Its authors rethink the prevailing views about Maya economic organization and offer new perspectives. They attribute the dearth of Maya market research to two factors: persistent assumptions that Maya society and its rainforest environment lacked complexity, and an absence of physical evidence for marketplaces—a problem that plagues market research around the world.
Many Mayanists now agree that no site was self-sufficient, and that from the earliest times robust local and regional exchange existed alongside long-distance trade. Contributors to this volume suggest that marketplaces, the physical spaces signifying the presence of a market economy, did not exist for purely economic reasons but served to exchange information and create social ties as well.
The Ancient Maya Marketplace offers concrete links between Maya archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary cultures. Its in-depth review of current research will help future investigators to recognize and document marketplaces as a long-standing Maya cultural practice. The volume also provides detailed comparative data for premodern societies elsewhere in the world.
The Asian Trade Revolution
The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan TradeNiels Steensgaard
University of Chicago Press, 1975
In this work Neils Steensgaard combines an analytical economic approach with detailed historic scholarship to provide an imaginitive and important analysis of a central incident in modern world history. The event is the breaking of the Portuguese monopoly on Asian trade in the seventeenth century by English and Dutch mercantile interests. This change the author demonstrates, was not simply the triumph of the new powers over the old. Rather, the Dutch--English victory heralded a structural change in international trade: the triumph of entrepreneurial capitalism over the older economic mode of the "peddler-merchant."
Professor Steensgaard's study is divided into two major parts. The first examines the economic and political structure of the seventeenth century institutions in the Near East, Portugal, England, and the Netherlands. The author demonstrates that the rise to preeminence of the English and Dutch East India Companies over the Portuguese "State of India" was the result of the superior economic and bureaucratic organization of the former. The eclipse of Portuguese power in general, the author argues, is best understood as an institutional failure–an inability to adapt to changing patterns and demands of economic life.
The second part of Professor Steensgaard's study provides a detailed historical account of an important event in the fall of the Portuguese trading empire–the loss of the city of Hormuz in 1622. Hormuz, located at a strategic point at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, was a central port city on the Asian trade route. It fell to an English and Persian force. The author demonstrates why this event exemplifies the Portuguese institutional weaknesses that are discussed in the first part of the book.
The Bourgeois Virtues
Ethics for an Age of CommerceDeirdre Nansen McCloskey
University of Chicago Press, 2006
McCloskey’s sweeping, charming, and even humorous survey of ethical thought and economic realities—from Plato to Barbara Ehrenreich—overturns every assumption we have about being bourgeois. Can you be virtuous and bourgeois? Do markets improve ethics? Has capitalism made us better as well as richer? Yes, yes, and yes, argues McCloskey, who takes on centuries of capitalism’s critics with her erudition and sheer scope of knowledge. Applying a new tradition of “virtue ethics” to our lives in modern economies, she affirms American capitalism without ignoring its faults and celebrates the bourgeois lives we actually live, without supposing that they must be lives without ethical foundations.
High Noon, Kant, Bill Murray, the modern novel, van Gogh, and of course economics and the economy all come into play in a book that can only be described as a monumental project and a life’s work. The Bourgeois Virtues is nothing less than a dazzling reinterpretation of Western intellectual history, a dead-serious reply to the critics of capitalism—and a surprising page-turner.
The Casas Grandes World
Curtis Schaafsma
University of Utah Press, 1999
The Casas Grandes World focuses on a remarkable prehistoric culture that extended through parts of present-day Chihuahua, Sonora, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, centering on the large Mexican site of Casas Grandes. The thousands of prehistoric sites in this vast area have only recently been considered related to each other, yet it now appears that for more than 200 years, from about AD 1200 to 1425, the people of the region traded with each other, made coursed-adobe pueblos in the desert country, manufactured magnificent pottery, and produced some of the most extraordinary rock art in North America. Casas Grandes was recently designated a World Heritage Site by the United Nations.
During is florescence Casas Grandes served as a conduit or nexus between the Anasazi of the ancient American Southwest and the Mexican civilizations to the south. Using the seminal work of Charles Di Peso as a touchstone, and drawing on significant new archaeological work, this volume offers a reevaluation of the extent, history, and meaning of the great site and its far-reaching connections. It also considers influences on the Hohokam of Arizona and the peoples of west Mexico, positing the existence of a vast sphere of Casas Grandes cultural influence.
The Commerce of Cartography
Making and Marketing Maps in Eighteenth-Century France and EnglandMary Sponberg Pedley
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Conceptualizing the relationship between economics and cartography, Pedley traces the process of mapmaking from compilation, production, and marketing to consumption, reception, and criticism. In detailing the rise of commercial cartography, Pedley explores qualitative issues of mapmaking as well. Why, for instance, did eighteenth-century ideals of aesthetics override the modern values of accuracy and detail? And what, to an eighteenth-century mind and eye, qualified as a good map?
A thorough and engaging study of the business of cartography during the Enlightenment, The Commerce of Cartography charts a new cartographic landscape and will prove invaluable to scholars of economic history, historical geography, and the history of publishing.
The Commerce of Louisiana During the French Regime, 1699-1763
N. M. Miller Surrey, with an introduction by Gregory A. Waselkov
University of Alabama Press, 2006
By the time French colonists sought a portion of the New World’s riches, much of those resources had already been claimed by Spain and Portugal. Once settled in North America, however, they quickly turned their attentions to commerce, specifically to trade within the Louisiana region. For almost 65 years French explorers, soldiers, administrators, and accountants focused on establishing a string of forts and small villages at key points in the Mississippi and Illinois River valleys, eastward to the Mobile River drainage, and westward toward New Mexico. Despite a long and costly war at home, for a time it looked as though the French would be successful in controlling a vast swath of the middle of North America with routes stretching from Quebec City to New Orleans.
Under the guidance of leaders such as LaSalle, Joliet, Father Marquette, Frontenac, Hennepin, and Bienville, the French made a good start in the lucrative trading business and established working relationships with most of the Indians of the region. But by 1763, with war in Europe and a faltering economy at home, commerce in the New World eroded along with the ability of the French to control the region and to protect their investments from the encroachment of the Spanish and English.
The Commerce of War
Exchange and Social Order in Latin EpicNeil Coffee
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Latin epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Lucan’s Civil War, and Statius’s Thebaid addressed Roman aristocrats whose dealings in gifts, favors, and payments defined their conceptions of social order. In The Commerce of War, Neil Coffee argues that these exchanges play a central yet overlooked role in epic depictions of Roman society.
Tracing the collapse of an aristocratic worldview across all three poems, Coffee highlights the distinction they draw between reciprocal gift giving among elites and the more problematic behaviors of buying and selling. In the Aeneid, customary gift and favor exchanges are undermined by characters who view human interaction as short-term and commodity-driven. The Civil War takes the next logical step, illuminating how Romans cope once commercial greed has supplanted traditional values. Concluding with the Thebaid, which focuses on the problems of excessive consumption rather than exchange, Coffee closes his powerful case that these poems constitute far-reaching critiques of Roman society during its transition from republic to empire.
The Connected Iron Age
Interregional Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, 900-600 BCEEdited by Jonathan M. Hall and James F. Osborne
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The early first millennium BCE marks one of the most culturally diverse periods in the history of the eastern Mediterranean. Surveying the region from Greece to Iraq, one finds a host of cultures and political formations, all distinct, yet all visibly connected in meaningful ways. These include the early polities of Geometric period Greece, the Phrygian kingdom of central Anatolia, the Syro-Anatolian city-states, the seafaring Phoenicians and the biblical Israelites of the southern Levant, Egypt’s Twenty-first through Twenty-fifth Dynasties, the Urartian kingdom of the eastern Anatolian highlands, and the expansionary Neo-Assyrian Empire of northern Mesopotamia. This volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the social and political significance of how interregional networks operated within and between Mediterranean cultures during that era.
The Conquest of Cool
Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip ConsumerismThomas Frank
University of Chicago Press, 1997
"[Thomas Frank is] perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment."—Gerald Marzorati, New York Times Book Review
"An indispensable survival guide for any modern consumer."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Frank makes an ironclad case not only that the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit."—Geoff Pevere, Toronto Globe and Mail
"The Conquest of Cool helps us understand why, throughout the last third of the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly confused gentility with conformity, irony with protest, and an extended middle finger with a populist manifesto. . . . His voice is an exciting addition to the soporific public discourse of the late twentieth century."—T. J. Jackson Lears, In These Times
"An invaluable argument for anyone who has ever scoffed at hand-me-down counterculture from the '60s. A spirited and exhaustive analysis of the era's advertising."—Brad Wieners, Wired Magazine
"Tom Frank is . . . not only old-fashioned, he's anti-fashion, with a place in his heart for that ultimate social faux pas, leftist politics."—Roger Trilling, Details
The Culture and Commerce of Texts
Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century EnglandHarold Love
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998
Long after the establishment of printing in England, many writers and composers still preferred to publish their work through handwritten copies. Texts so transmitted included some of the most distinguished poetry and music of the seventeenth century, along with a rich variety of political, scientific, antiquarian, and philosophical writings. While censorship was one reason for this persistence of the older practice, scribal publication remained the norm for texts that were required only in small numbers, or whose authors wished to avoid the “stigma” of print.
This is the first book to consider the trade in manuscripts as an important supplement to that in printed books, and to describe the agencies that met the need for rapid duplication of key texts.
The Dignity of Commerce
Markets and the Moral Foundations of Contract LawNathan B. Oman
University of Chicago Press, 2016
With The Dignity of Commerce, Nathan B. Oman argues persuasively that well-functioning markets are morally desirable in and of themselves and thus a fit object of protection through contract law. Markets, Oman shows, are about more than simple economic efficiency. To do business with others, we must demonstrate understanding of and satisfy their needs. This ability to see the world from another’s point of view inculcates key virtues that support a liberal society. Markets also provide a context in which people can peacefully cooperate in the absence of political, religious, or ideological agreement. Finally, the material prosperity generated by commerce has an ameliorative effect on a host of social ills, from racial discrimination to environmental destruction.
The first book to place the moral status of the market at the center of the justification for contract law, The Dignity of Commerce is sure to elicit serious discussion about this central area of legal studies.
The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment
American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900David M. Pletcher
University of Missouri Press, 1998
The move to encourage trade with Canada and Mexico during the 1990s, culminating with the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), has had a long background extending as far back as the late eighteenth century. American trade with both Canada and Latin America rapidly increased during the last third of the nineteenth century as a result of burgeoning industry and agriculture in the United States. The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment is the first detailed examination of the economic and political forces behind this rapid growth and their effect on government policy.
Based on a thorough examination of government documents, congressional debates and reports, private papers of government and business leaders, and newspapers, David M. Pletcher begins this monumental study with a comprehensive survey of U.S. trade following the Civil War. He goes on to outline the problems of building a coherent trade policy toward Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America. The study concludes by analyzing a series of abortive trade reform efforts and examining the effects of the Spanish-American War.
Pletcher rejects the long-held belief that American business and government engaged in a deliberate, consistent drive for economic hegemony in the hemisphere during the late 1800s. Instead he finds that the American government improvised and experimented with ways to further trade expansion. But American businessmen were often more interested in domestic trade than in trade with foreign markets. In fact, many of them resisted efforts to lower the American tariff or otherwise encourage American trade abroad.
The combination of traditionalist and revisionist insight with Pletcher's own deep knowledge and research provides the reader with a comprehensive new interpretation of hemispheric trade expansion at the end of the nineteenth century.
The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations
Industry and Exports, 1893-1921William H. Becker
University of Chicago Press, 1982
The Economy of British West Florida, 1763-1783
Robin F. A. Fabel
University of Alabama Press, 1988
The untold economic story of Britain’s Gulf Coast frontier.
This is the first book-length investigation of the economy of British West Florida and the extent to which it was economically viable given that it had been an economic failure for Spain. In it, author Robin Fabel explores both the territory's economy and history but also analyzes previously neglected but key aspects of British West Florida, including the maritime life of the province, the institution of slavery, and the potentially great immigration scheme sponsored by the Company of Military Adventures.
The British divided Florida into two colonies: East Florida and West Florida. West Florida comprised the area between the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee, and Mississippi rivers, and from the Gulf of Mexico north to thirty-two degrees twenty-eight minutes north latitude, roughly the latitude of modern-day Jackson, MS and Montgomery, AL. In the geographic center of the colony were Mobile, Alabama and Pensacola, Floriday. British West Florida included parts of the states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi and existed from 1763 until 1783 at the end of the American Revolutionary War.
Fabel contrasts the founding of Georgia, where slaves were initially excluded, with West Florida, where the slave trade became important economically. The British believed that only enslaved Blacks could labor successfully in the hot climate. Fabel gives an account of how owners employed enslaved people, how rare it was for slaves to be emancipated, and the passage of slave laws for West Florida. Fabel also explores British West Florida’s trade with Native Americans and the Caribbean islands, as well as the colony's relationships with neighboring Spanish and French communities.
Fabel's work offers an engaging and accessible account of the history of an expansive region of colonial North America during a fluid period of colonial history before American independence.
The Fair Trade Revolution
Edited by John Bowes
Pluto Press, 2011
Fair Trade is now mainstream, with large companies like Cadbury's and supermarkets such as Sainsbury's producing and stocking many Fair Trade products. The authors of this collection, many of whom were responsible for the initial success of Fair Trade, emphasise the importance of ensuring that farmers and other producers remain the main beneficiaries. Punchy chapters, illustrated with many real-world examples, cover all the important issues including the tensions between large and small operators, the impact of recession, environmental policy and the danger of large operators embracing Fair Trade more in word than in practice.
Written by the leading lights of the Fair Trade movement, including Harriet Lamb (Executive Director of the Fairtrade Foundation) and Bruce Crowther (Establisher of the world's first Fair Trade Town) this book will inspire activists and consumers to keep making the right choices.
The First British Trade Expedition to China
Captain Weddell and the Courteen Fleet in Asia and Late Ming CantonNicholas D. Jackson
Hong Kong University Press, 2022
In The First British Trade Expedition to China, Nicholas D. Jackson explores the pioneering British trade expedition to China launched in the late Ming period by Charles I and the Courteen Association. Utilizing the vivid perspective of its commander Captain John Weddell, this study concentrates on the fleet’s adventures in south China between Portuguese Macao and the provincial capital, Guangzhou. Tracing the obscure origins of Sino-British diplomatic and commercial relations back to the late Ming era, Jackson examines the first episodes of Sino-British interaction, exchange, and collision in the seventeenth century. His analysis constitutes a groundbreaking study of early modern British initiatives and enterprises in the coastal areas of south China.
The First Chouteaus
RIVER BARONS OF EARLY ST. LOUISWilliam E. Foley and C. David Rice
University of Illinois Press, 1983
For more than half a century, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau dominated trade and enterprise in the Mississippi Valley. In their various roles as merchants, Indian traders, bankers, land speculators, governmental advisors, public officials, and community leaders, the Chouteau brothers exerted a tremendous influence on westward expansion. This is the first full account of their lives and illustrious careers.
The Haydn Economy
Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth CenturyNicholas Mathew
University of Chicago Press, 2022
In this far-reaching work of music history and criticism, Nicholas Mathew reimagines the world of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries, with its catastrophic upheavals and thrilling sense of potential. In the process, Mathew tackles critical questions of particular moment: how we tell the history of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late eighteenth-century culture to incipient capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were—and remain—inextricably entwined.
The Haydn Economy weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn’s career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterházy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, during which he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew asserts, Haydn’s historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity—whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep histories of capitalism that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture.
The Intimacies of Four Continents
Lisa Lowe
Duke University Press, 2015
The Isthmus of Corinth
Crossroads of the Mediterranean WorldDavid K. Pettegrew
University of Michigan Press, 2016
David Pettegrew’s book offers a new history of the Isthmus of Corinth from the Romans’ initial presence in Greece during the Hellenistic era to the epic transformations of the Empire in late antiquity. A new interpretation of the extensive literary evidence outlines how the Isthmus became the most famous land bridge of the ancient world, central to maritime interests of Corinth, and a medium for Rome’s conquest, annexation, and administration in the Greek east. A fresh synthesis of archaeological evidence and the results of a recent intensive survey on the Isthmus describe the physical development of fortifications, settlements, harbors, roads, and sanctuaries in the region. The author includes chapters on the classical background of the concept isthmos, the sacking of Corinth and the defeat of the Achaean League, colonization in the Late Roman Republic, the Emperor Nero’s canal project and its failure, the growth of Roman settlement in the territory, and the end of athletic contests at Isthmia. The Isthmus of Corinth offers a powerful case study in the ways that shifting Mediterranean worlds transformed a culturally significant landscape over the course of a millennium.
The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World
Consumption, Commoditization, and Everyday PracticeBrad Weiss
Duke University Press, 1996
Grounded in a richly detailed ethnography of Haya practice, Weiss’s analysis considers the symbolic qualities and values embedded in goods and transactions across a wide range of cultural activity: agricultural practice and food preparation, the body’s experience of epidemic disease from AIDS to the infant affliction of “plastic teeth,” and long-standing forms of social movement and migration. Weiss emphasizes how Haya images of consumption describe the relationship between their local community and the global economy. Throughout, he demonstrates that particular commodities and more general market processes are always material and meaningful forces with the potential for creativity as well as disruption in Haya social life. By calling attention to the productive dimensions of this spatial and temporal world, his work highlights the importance of human agency in not only the Haya but any sociocultural order.
Offering a significant contribution to the anthropological theories of practice, embodiment, and agency, and enriching our understanding of the lives of a rural African people, The Making and Unmaking of the Haya Lived World will interest historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, and scholars of cultural studies.
The Memory of Trade
Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesian IslandPatricia Spyer
Duke University Press, 2000
Drawing on more than two years of archival and ethnographic research, Spyer examines the dynamics of contact with the Dutch and Europeans, Suharto’s postcolonial regime, and with the competing religions of Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism in the context of the recent conversion of pagan Aruese. While arguing that Aru identity and community are defined largely in terms of absence, longing, memory, and desire, she also incorporates present-day realities—such as the ecological destruction wrought by the Aru trade in such luxury goods as pearls and shark fins—without overlooking the mystique and ritual surrounding these activities. Imprinted on the one hand by the archipelago’s long engagement with extended networks of commerce and communication and, on the other, by modernity’s characteristic repressions and displacements, Aruese make and manage their lives somewhat precariously within what they often seem to construe as a dangerously expanding—if still enticing—world. By documenting not only the particular expectations and strategies Aruese have developed in dealing with this larger world but also the price they pay for participation therein, The Memory of Trade speaks to problems commonly faced elsewhere in the frontier spaces of modern nation-states.
Balancing particularly astute analysis with classic ethnography, The Memory of Trade will appeal not only to anthropologists and historians but also to students and specialists of Southeast Asia, modernity, and globalization.
The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy
Development and Technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific WarChristopher Howe
University of Chicago Press, 1996
"Thoughtful, well-organized, and lucidly written and reflects many years of painstaking research in different literatures."—Business Horizons
"The best analysis yet in English of the role of technology in Japan's emergence as a global economic power."—David J. Jeremy, Technology and Culture
"An important addition to Japanese economic history and the concept of creating relative advantage in trade."—Richard Rice, Journal of Asian Studies
"No other work in English approaches Christopher Howe's combination of a sweeping historical perspective with a comprehensive yet in-depth analysis of factors underlying Japan's pre-1940 economic 'miracle.' . . . [An] illuminating study."—Steven J. Ericson, American Historical Review
The Postclassic Mesoamerican World
Michael E Smith
University of Utah Press, 2003
Edited by Michael E. Smith and Frances F. Berdan
Anthropology and Archaeology
The past two decades have seen an explosion of research on Postclassic Mesoamerican societies. In this ambitious new volume, the editors and contributors seek to present a complete picture of the middle and late Postclassic period (ca. AD 1100-1500) employing a new theoretical framework.
Mesoamerican societies after the collapse of the great city-states of Tula and Chichen Itza stand out from earlier societies in a number of ways. They had larger regional populations, smaller polities, a higher volume of long-distance trade, greater diversity of trade goods, a more commercialized economy, and new standardized forms of pictorial writing and iconography. The emerging archaeological record reveals larger quantities of imported goods in Postclassic contexts, and ethnohistoric accounts describe marketplaces, professional merchants, and the use of money throughout Mesoamerica by the time of the Spanish conquest. The integration of this commercial economy with new forms of visual communication produced a dynamic world system that reached every corner of Mesoamerica.
Thirty-six focused articles by twelve authors describe and analyze the complexity of Postclassic Mesoamerica. After an initial theoretical section, chapters are organized by key themes: polities, economic networks, information networks, case studies, and comparisons. Covering a region from western Mexico to Yucatan and the southwestern Maya highlands, this volume should be in the library of anyone with a serious interest in ancient Mexico.
The Science of Deception
Psychology and Commerce in AmericaMichael Pettit
University of Chicago Press, 2012
The Selden Map of China
A New Understanding of the Ming DynastyHongping Annie Nie
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2019
Exploring the commercial aims of the Ming Dynasty, the port city of Quanzhou and its connections with the voyages of the early traveler Zheng He, this book describes the historical background of the era in which the map was used. It also includes an analysis of the skills and techniques involved in Chinese map-making and the significance of the compass bearings, scale, and ratios found on the map, all of which combine to represent a breakthrough in cartographic techniques.
The enthralling story revealed by this extraordinary artifact sheds light on the long history of China’s relationship with the sea and with the wider world.
The Southern Frontier 1670-1732
Verner Crane, with a new introduction by Steven C. Hahn
University of Alabama Press, 2004
A classic resource on the struggle for dominance in southern North America during the colonial period
This volume recounts the clashes and intrigues that played out over the landscape of the Old Southwest and across six decades as the Spanish, French, British, and ultimately Americans vied for control. Rivalry began soon after initial discovery, mapping, and exploration as the world powers, particularly England and France, competed for control of the lucrative fur trade in the Mississippi valley. The French attempted to establish trade networks stretching from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Mississippi River and northward from ports on the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River. But they found the British already entrenched there.
Verner Crane guides us through this multinational struggle and navigates the border wars and diplomatic intrigues that played crucial roles in the settlement of the South by Euro-Americans. In his new introduction, Steven Hahn places the work in the context of its time, sketches its publication history, and provides biographical information on Crane.
The Spirit of 1976
Commerce, Community, and the Politics of CommemorationTammy S. Gordon
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013
The most important national commemoration of the twentieth century, the 1976 bicentennial celebration gave rise to a broad-ranging debate over how the American Revolution should be remembered and represented. Federal planners seeking an uncritical glorification of the nation's founding came up against an array of constituencies with other interests and objectives. Inspired by the “new social history” that looked at the past “from the bottom up,” Americans who had previously been disenfranchised by traditional national narratives—African Americans, women, American Indians, workers, young people—demanded a voice and representation in the planning. Local communities, similarly suspicious of federal direction, sought control over their own bicentennial events. Corporate representatives promoted an approach that championed the convergence of patriotism and private enterprise, while commercial interests applied the marketing techniques of an expanding consumerism to hawk every imaginable kind of patriotic souvenir to all of these groups.
The end result of these competing efforts, Tammy S. Gordon shows, was a national celebration that reflected some common themes, including a mistrust of federal power, an embrace of decentralized authority, and a new cultural emphasis on the importance of the self. The American Revolution Bicentennial can thus be seen as both a product of the social and political changes of the 1960s and a harbinger of things to come. After 1976, the postwar myth of a consensus view of American history came to an end, ensuring that future national commemorations would continue to be contested.
The Value of Things
Prehistoric to Contemporary Commodities in the Maya RegionEdited by Jennifer P. Mathews and Thomas H. Guderjan
University of Arizona Press, 2017
Jade, stone tools, honey and wax, ceramics, rum, land. What gave these commodities value in the Maya world, and how were those values determined? What factors influenced the rise and fall of a commodity’s value? The Value of Things examines the social and ritual value of commodities in Mesoamerica, providing a new and dynamic temporal view of the roles of trade of commodities and elite goods from the prehistoric Maya to the present.
Editors Jennifer P. Mathews and Thomas H. Guderjan begin the volume with a review of the theoretical literature related to the “value of things.” Throughout the volume, well-known scholars offer chapters that examine the value of specific commodities in a broad time frame—from prehistoric, colonial, and historic times to the present. Using cases from the Maya world on both the local level and the macro-regional, contributors look at jade, agricultural products (ancient and contemporary), stone tools, salt, cacao (chocolate), honey and wax, henequen, sugarcane and rum, land, ceramic (ancient and contemporary), and contemporary tourist handicrafts.
Each chapter author looks into what made their specific commodity valuable to ancient, historic, and contemporary peoples in the Maya region. Often a commodity’s worth goes far beyond its financial value; indeed, in some cases, it may not even be viewed as something that can be sold. Other themes include the rise and fall in commodity values based on perceived need, rarity or overproduction, and change in available raw materials; the domestic labor side of commodities, including daily life of the laborers; and relationships between elites and nonelites in production.
Examining, explaining, and theorizing how people ascribe value to what they trade, this scholarly volume provides a rich look at local and regional Maya case studies through centuries of time.
Contributors:
Rani T. Alexander
Dean E. Arnold
Timothy Beach
Briana Bianco
Steven Bozarth
Tiffany C. Cain
Scott L. Fedick
Thomas H. Guderjan
John Gust
Eleanor Harrison-Buck
Brigitte Kovacevich
Samantha Krause
Joshua J. Kwoka
Richard M. Leventhal
Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach
Jennifer P. Mathews
Heather McKillop
Allan D. Meyers
Gary Rayson
Mary Katherine Scott
E. Cory Sills
The Woman in the Window
Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian NovelRussell Scott Valentino
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
With chapters on Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky as well as Pasternak and Nabokov, The Woman in the Window argues that Russian authors worked through this question via their depictions of “mixed-up men.” Such characters, according to Valentino, reveal that in a world where social reality and personal identity depend on consensual fantasies, the old masculine figure loses its grounding and can easily drift away. Valentino charts a range of masculine character types thrown off stride by the new commercially inflected world: those who embrace blind confidence, those who are split with doubt or guilt, and those who look for an ideal of steadfastness and purity to keep afloat—a woman in a window.
The Worlds of Victor Sassoon
Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941Rosemary Wakeman
University of Chicago Press, 2024
In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai. In the early twentieth century, these cities were at the forefront of the sweeping changes taking the world by storm as it entered an era of globalized commerce and the unprecedented circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Wakeman explores these cities and the world they helped transform through the life of Victor Sassoon, who in 1924 gained control of his powerful family’s trading and banking empire. She tracks his movements between these three cities as he grows his family’s fortune and transforms its holdings into a global juggernaut. Using his life as its point of entry, The Worlds of Victor Sassoon paints a broad portrait not just of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and leisure but also of the discrimination, exploitation, and violence wreaked by a world increasingly driven by the demands of capital.
Trade and Employment in Developing Countries, Volume 1
Individual StudiesEdited by Anne O. Krueger, Hal B. Lary, Terry Monson, and Narongchai Akrasanee
University of Chicago Press, 1980
Ten countries are studied: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Indonesia, the Ivory Coast, Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, and Uruguay. The contributors to the volume analyze the link between trade strategies and employment within a common framework, and the analyses of trade policy include the level and structure of protection, the relation of trade policy to labor demand, the labor intensiveness of trade, and the extent of distortions in factor markets and their effects on trade.
Trade and Employment in Developing Countries, Volume 2
Factor Supply and SubstitutionEdited by Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1982
Trade and Employment in Developing Countries, Volume 3
Synthesis and ConclusionsAnne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 1988
Trade and Privateering in Spanish Florida, 1732–1763
Joyce Elizabeth Harman, With a New Introduction by Carl E. Swanson
University of Alabama Press, 2004
A groundbreaking study of commerce, conflict, and survival in colonial Spanish Florida.
Trade and Privateering examines the illegal yet highly profitable and mutually beneficial trade between Spanish Florida and the English colonies on the eastern seaboard in the mid-18th century. In St. Augustine, the arrival of subsidies from Spain was erratic, causing shortages of food and supplies, so authorities ignored the restrictions on trade with foreign colonies and welcomed British goods. Likewise, the British colonists sought Spanish products from Florida, especially oranges.
But when England and Spain became declared enemies in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the French and Indian Wars, this tacit trade arrangement was threatened, and the result was a rise of privateering in the region. Rather than do without Spanish goods, the English began to attack and capture Spanish vessels with their cargoes at sea. Likewise, the Spaniards resorted to privateering as a means of steadily supplying the Florida colony. Harman concludes that, both willingly and unwillingly, the English colonies helped their Spanish neighbor to sustain its position in the Southeast.
Trade and Romance
Michael Murrin
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Trade and Structural Change in Pacific Asia
Edited by Colin I. Bradford Jr. and William H. Branson
University of Chicago Press, 1987
Themes in the research reported here includes the sectoral composition of output and trade; rates of structural change in production and exports and their relation to economic growth; the effect of abundant resource endowments on industrialization and manufactured exports; the nature of the mix between active government policies and market forces; and the balance between demand-determined and supply-determined industrialization and exports. Many of the issues explored have important implications for United States foreign economic policy, and the volume includes a look at the basic economic and political forces influencing shifts in United States trade policy in the postwar period.
A timely and informative analysis, the volume probes the causes and consequences of economic growth in Pacific Asia, focusing on the interaction of exports of manufactured goods and the developmental process. The results reported contribute to ongoing research in structural change and economic policy and will be important to economists working on empirical patters in international trade and the process of economic development.
Trade in Services in the Asia-Pacific Region
Edited by Takatoshi Ito and Anne O. Krueger
University of Chicago Press, 2002
This volume is the first book-length attempt to analyze trade in services in the Asia-Pacific region. Contributors provide overviews of basic issues involved in studying the service sector; investigate the impact of increasing trade in services on the economies of Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong; present detailed analyses of specific service sectors (telecommunications, financial services, international tourism, and accounting); and extend our understanding of trade in services beyond the usual concept (measured in balance of payment statistics) to include indirect services and services undertaken abroad by subsidiaries and affiliates.
Trade with Japan
Has the Door Opened Wider?Edited by Paul Krugman
University of Chicago Press, 1991
Trading Freedom
How Trade with China Defined Early AmericaDael A. Norwood
University of Chicago Press, 2022
The economic and geographic development of the early United States is usually thought of in trans-Atlantic terms, defined by entanglements with Europe and Africa. In Trading Freedom, Dael A. Norwood recasts these common conceptions by looking to Asia, making clear that from its earliest days, the United States has been closely intertwined with China—monetarily, politically, and psychologically.
Norwood details US trade with China from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries—a critical period in America’s self-definition as a capitalist nation—and shows how global commerce was central to the articulation of that national identity. Trading Freedom illuminates how debates over political economy and trade policy, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the looming sectional struggle over slavery were all influenced by Sino-American relations. Deftly weaving together interdisciplinary threads from the worlds of commerce, foreign policy, and immigration, Trading Freedom thoroughly dismantles the idea that American engagement with China is anything new.
Trading Roles
Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial PotosíJane E. Mangan
Duke University Press, 2005
Drawing on wills and dowries, judicial cases, town council records, and royal decrees, Mangan brings alive the bustle of trade in Potosí. She examines quotidian economic transactions in light of social custom, ethnicity, and gender, illuminating negotiations over vendor locations, kinship ties that sustained urban trade through the course of silver booms and busts, and credit practices that developed to mitigate the pressures of the market economy. Mangan argues that trade exchanges functioned as sites to negotiate identities within this colonial multiethnic society. Throughout the study, she demonstrates how women and indigenous peoples played essential roles in Potosí’s economy through the commercial transactions she describes so vividly.
Trading Spaces
The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American CapitalismEmma Hart
University of Chicago Press, 2019
When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy.
Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less-fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century, this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.
Tragic History Of The Sea
C.R. Boxer
University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Compelling stories of shipwreck, adventure, and death on the high seas, now back in print.
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a time of great colonial expansion, marked by a mercantile frenzy of ships carrying merchants, aristocrats, missionaries, sailors, Inquisitors, botanists, and statesmen pursuing the spoils of empire. Among the narratives that chronicled these voyages, those of the Portuguese are unequaled. C. R. Boxer’s fascinating translations of famous Portuguese shipwreck stories detail the disasters and terrors plaguing the perilous sea trading route between Portugal and India.
In the tradition of Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Defoe, and Poe, these dramatic stories of shipwreck—and those who lived to tell about it—represent existence and survival pushed to the limits. They describe disastrous turns of fate and miraculous rescues, heroism and cowardice, and offer the exhilaration and sheer emotive appeal of a tale of adventure well told. Often circulated in pamphlet form, these stories recounting the dangers and terrors of storm-tossed ocean voyages and the fate of castaways in distant lands were a popular genre, rife with compelling and often gory details. This first ever paperback edition includes a new translation of the tragic tale of Captain Manuel de Sousa Sepúlveda, shipwrecked with his family on the sands of Africa in 1552, the previous English versions of which have long been unavailable. Vividly descriptive and engrossing, these tales of selfishness, cruelty, despair, pirates, mayhem, and harrowing storms will captivate readers.
Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946
Ronald H. Limbaugh
University of Nevada Press, 2011