Chapter 2 is a history of the connection between wheat cultivation and the spread of slavery in areas of Dutch control, primarily focusing on Kings County (Brooklyn) and the Hudson Valley. This chapter pushes back against the “staple interpretation” of slavery, the idea that slavery flourished when and where it did primarily because of the advantages of geography and soil that allowed for cash crops such as tobacco and cotton. Historians have failed to explain why farmers who grew wheat would prefer slaves to short-term hired hands. The chapter argues that New York’s slave-owning farmers found slaves to be economically valuable in helping to solve the “peak-labor problem” – the difficulty of finding extra laborers during the busy wheat-harvest season in August. By ensuring a ready supply of enslaved laborers at hand, a wheat farmer could be more confident in planting more wheat, knowing that he would have sufficient labor to harvest it. From the first Dutch settlement in the 1620s until roughly 1820, eastern New York was a grain-producing region that focused first and foremost on raising wheat. In these years, it was also a society of slaveholders.

Diamonds and jewels – their brilliant refractions providing prototypes for intellectual elasticity and insight into connections between things and gender, colonialism, marriage for hire, and ecosystems – spring forth in Belinda and Les bijoux indiscrets to teach characters to become better interpreters. This chapter argues that in these novels gems become “mouths” that kinesthetically narrate and enact material histories: the labor and commerce that produced them, the deleterious enmeshment of women and objects, and women’s right to be human – that is, honest, rational, fragmented, stained, and radiant. Belinda’s allusion to the historic 48-carat Pigot links domestic larceny in matchmaking to colonial theft in India and Ireland. Markets collide as Belinda demonstrates how the lexicon of purity and perfection dominates the commercialization of courtship and of advisory treatises instructing the public how to buy authentic diamonds. In conclusion, the chapter analyzes how a diamond leads to Lady Delacour’s restoration by teaching her how to belong with the human–nonhuman network.

The trade that destroys forests is worth a hundred times the money that is spent on protecting them. This will only change if the top producer and consumer countries of forest-risk commodities agree steps to shift global markets towards sustainability. We brought these countries together for the first time, to see if it could be done.

Chapter 4 unpacks the conundrum faced by Restoration acting companies. Audiences wanted new works, spectacle, and theatrical innovation, but the unforeseen consequences of the duopoly hobbled the ability of the companies to respond nimbly to changing conditions. Strapped for money and shackled by the costs of maintaining their expensive, high-tech playhouses, the acting companies were hard pressed to keep up with rival entertainments and products now enticing Londoners. Coffeehouses, spas, pleasure gardens, dance recitals, and music concerts all offered convenience, variety, and value for money. Goods in expanded bourses also tempted consumers. The theatre largely responded to the new world of goods and pastimes through allusion and imitation, oftentimes to brilliant results. Intermedial exchange between the worlds of music and theatre resulted in the gorgeous dramatic operas still staged today. The new consumerism featured in the sparkling, witty comedies spoofing the London elite. Nonetheless, allusiveness could not rival actual experiences and commodities, which often could be had for less money and greater convenience than an afternoon at the playhouse.

Why did the United States establish an early American Empire in the Pacific (1856-1898)? This chapter summarizes the argument of this book, explaining why patterns of imperialism demonstrate the influence of commodity prices and entrepreneurs for distinctive patterns of American imperialism. It then addresses 1898. Scholars often suggest that 1898 was the moment when the United States became an empire. This chapter argues that this view is misplaced. Instead, 1898 marks a shift in the US approach to empire, when the US Navy replaced the small entrepreneur as the key figure in US expansion. It then addresses the lessons learned from this book, with an emphasis on the politics of race in the contemporary Pacific and struggles for recognition in the region.

Guano imperialism marked the first major commodity rush into the Pacific. Between 1850 and 1900, the United States claimed over a hundred islands across the world through the Guano Act of 1856. Why did the United States develop a guano empire? Most scholarly attention focuses on state-led explanations for guano imperialism, like the influence of American farmers and naval lobbies on Congress. By contrast, this chapter presents evidence that entrepreneurs led the way into the Pacific. A sudden rise in guano prices led US entrepreneurs to search for guano and threats to their interests from foreign competitors led them to search for government protection.

Why did the United States establish an early American Empire in the Pacific (1856-1898)? This chapter first discusses the conventional wisdom that focuses on the role of naval power, trade with China, and missionaries. It shows that these explanations are unable to explain patterns of American imperialism in the Pacific. It then introduces a theory of entrepreneurs and highlights the contributions that an entrepreneurial theory makes to International Relations scholarship, including to theories of empire, territorial expansion, and contemporary struggles for recognition for indigenous peoples in the Asia-Pacific.

This chapter analyses foreign trade and trade routes in the Iberian Peninsula between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. It overviews the dual circumstances of the Christian kingdoms and of the Muslim al-Andalus over the long term, although it focuses especially on the period between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries, and on events taking place in Castile, Aragon and Portugal. The study tries to answer questions like how were the Iberian trade ties forged, how did the Iberian economies integrate with the Mediterranean and north-European markets, and what role did Iberian and foreign traders play in the commercial gamble. For this purpose, the Iberian trade is examined from three different angles. First, from the routes and the goods traded among the Iberian kingdoms as well as outside Iberia. Second, from the role of agents and institutions. This will involve an analysis of the distinction between local and foreign traders, as well as the influence of institutional frameworks on foreign trade. Finally, the chapter clarifies the reasons why Iberia achieved a leading position in European trade during the later middle ages, and why it spearheaded foreign trade at the dawn of the sixteenth century and the so-called “First Global Age”.

Economic historians have placed commercialization at the centre of Europe’s early modern capitalism, emphasizing the importance of domestic and international trade, shipbuilding and concomitant manufactures, the financial sector, and urbanization. As the Iberian polities extended geographically to Africa, Asia and the Americas during the early modern period, trade, whether domestic, international or colonial, had a critical effect upon economic development. However, the economic impact of colonial expansion was uneven across Iberia. Iberia commercial exchange associated with the overseas empires produced surprisingly few backward and forward linkages in the European national economies. The question this chapter seeks to address is thus to what extent and how Iberian trade, especially colonial trade, supported or hindered economic development in the early modern period.

Despite the restrictions that had been imposed on domestic travel since the early seventeenth century – which included checkpoints and the need for travel permits – in early modern Japan people traveled, merchandise moved, and ideas circulated. Commercial publishers played a key role in promoting the flows of people and things, not only with guidebooks and travel itineraries, as one would expect, but also in unusual places, such as board games and parodies of sumo rankings. Their output illuminates the democratization of knowledge and the creation of an interconnected archipelago in early modern Japan. More broadly, it reflects the global expansion of the information industry and the rise of tourism in the nineteenth century, linking Tokugawa Japan to dynamics at play the world over.

Although the normative model of rationality discussed in the first chapter is central to microeconomics, microeconomics is a positive theory describing, predicting, and explaining actual choices and their consequences. This chapter presents generalizations concerning market demand for commodities and services and consumer choice theory, which by means of economic models explains and to some extent corrects the generalizations concerning market demand. It presents an example of a simple economic model, where a consumer faces a choice between bundles consisting of only two infinitely divisible commodities, and it makes preliminary comments on the apparent empirical anomalies consumer choice theory faces. In reflecting on the theory of consumer choice and the explanation of demand, many questions arise concerning the structure of economic theory and whether the propositions of economic theory are in accord with the evidence. The material here should be familiar to economists.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

This chapter focuses on problems of raw materials and international order in the aftermath of the First World War. It shows how post-war planning during the war was premised on fears that crippling raw material shortages would weaken the military strength and economic vitality of the European Allied empires long after the conflict came to an end. However, efforts to ensure that wartime Allied measures of economic cooperation continued into the peace were blocked by the US government and industry groups. The chapter then shows how, after the war, a very different problem of raw materials – overproduction and glut – led to new, and more successful, international economic institution-building efforts. This other form of international cooperation, which was supported by powerful industry groups, proved highly durable, and later resulted in powerful institutions like OPEC. Where fears of raw material shortages were successful in spurring on preparations for war, it was the problem of overproduction that underpinned lasting peacetime efforts to reshape the international order and global economic governance

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

The trade that destroys forests is worth a hundred times the money that is spent on protecting them. This will only change if the top producer and consumer countries of forest-risk commodities agree steps to shift global markets towards sustainability. We brought these countries together for the first time, to see if it could be done.

This volume explores how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the turn of the century. We are interested not only in understanding how literature and the arts confronted the unprecedented penetration of global capital in Latin America, but also in exploring the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labor conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, creating original discourses, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds. This volume shows the new directions in turn-of-the-century scholarship that developed over the last two decades by investigating how the experience of capitalism produced an array of works that deal with primitive accumulation, transnational crossings, and an emerging technological and material reality in diverse geographies and a variety of cultural forms. The various contributions provide a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and nonmetropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed.