Great Trade Walls in Imperial China and Spain

Great Trade Walls in Imperial China and Spain
Author: Manuel Perez-Garcia
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2023-09-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000937275

This book offers a comparative and polycentric approach to the formation of global trade networks and goods that circumnavigated China, America, and Europe in the so-called process of “early globalization” during the early modern period. Based on a pioneering archival strategy developed by GECEM Project (Global Encounters between China and Europe www.gecem.eu) and funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the chapters in this volume deploy innovative methodology built on the process of clustering new empirical evidence on geostrategic locations to analyse complex socioeconomic systems. Each chapter in this volume focuses on a specific case study that validate the usefulness of this methodology for a more accurate analysis of the self-regulating institutions, social networks, circulation of global goods and information, and smuggling activities that characterised the nonlinear markets of early modern China, Europe, and the Americas. These studies constitute a clear example of the new directions of global (economic) history and how a bottom-up approach through new data mining and comparative method helps to unveil big research questions. The designing of GECEM Project Database (www.gecemdatabase.eu) stands out as cutting-edge Digital Humanities tool used in this book. This book is an insightful resource for scholars of Global History and Atlantic studies, including those interested in China’s trade and history, and its global encounters with the West. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes

The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes
Author: Raoul McLaughlin
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2016-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473889812

A fascinating history of the intricate web of trade routes connecting ancient Rome to Eastern civilizations, including its powerful rival, the Han Empire. The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes investigates the trade routes between Rome and the powerful empires of inner Asia, including the Parthian Empire of ancient Persia, and the Kushan Empire which seized power in Bactria (Afghanistan), laying claim to the Indus Kingdoms. Further chapters examine the development of Palmyra as a leading caravan city on the edge of Roman Syria. Raoul McLaughlin also delves deeply into Rome’s trade ventures through the Tarim territories, which led its merchants to the Han Empire of ancient China. Having established a system of Central Asian trade routes known as the Silk Road, the Han carried eastern products as far as Persia and the frontiers of the Roman Empire. Though they were matched in scale, the Han surpassed its European rival in military technology. The first book to address these subjects in a single comprehensive study, The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes explores Rome’s impact on the ancient world economy and reveals what the Chinese and Romans knew about their rival Empires.

Royal Witches

Royal Witches
Author: Gemma Hollman
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2019-10-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0750993502

'An important and timely book.' - Philippa Gregory Joan of Navarre was the richest woman in the land, at a time when war-torn England was penniless. Eleanor Cobham was the wife of a weak king's uncle – and her husband was about to fall from grace. Jacquetta Woodville was a personal enemy of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was about to take his revenge. Elizabeth Woodville was the widowed mother of a child king, fighting Richard III for her children's lives. In Royal Witches, Gemma Hollman explores the lives of these four unique women, looking at how rumours of witchcraft brought them to their knees in a time when superstition and suspicion was rife.

Global History with Chinese Characteristics

Global History with Chinese Characteristics
Author: Manuel Perez-Garcia
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 9811578656

This open access book considers a pivotal era in Chinese history from a global perspective. This book’s insight into Chinese and international history offers timely and challenging perspectives on initiatives like “Chinese characteristics”, “The New Silk Road” and “One Belt, One Road” in broad historical context. Global History with Chinese Characteristics analyses the feeble state capacity of Qing China questioning the so-called “High Qing” (shèng qīng 盛清) era’s economic prosperity as the political system was set into a “power paradox” or “supremacy dilemma”. This is a new thesis introduced by the author demonstrating that interventionist states entail weak governance. Macao and Marseille as a new case study aims to compare Mediterranean and South China markets to provide new insights into both modern eras’ rising trade networks, non-official institutions and interventionist impulses of autocratic states such as China’s Qing and Spain’s Bourbon empires.

The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction

The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction
Author: James A. Millward
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2013-04-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199782865

The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction is a new look at an ancient subject: the silk road that linked China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean across the expanses of Central Asia. James A. Millward highlights unusual but important biological, technological and cultural exchanges over the silk roads that stimulated development across Eurasia and underpin civilization in our modern, globalized world.

The Age of Trade

The Age of Trade
Author: Arturo Giraldez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2015-03-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 144224352X

This groundbreaking book presents the first full history of the Manila galleons, which marked the true beginning of a global economy. Arturo Giraldez, the world’s leading scholar of the galleons, traces the rise of the maritime route, which began with the founding of the city of Manila in 1571 and ended in 1815 when the last galleon left the port of Acapulco in New Spain (Mexico) for the Philippines, establishing a permanent connection between the Spanish empire in America with Asian countries, most importantly China, the main supplier of commodities during that era. Throughout the two-and-a-half-century history of the Manila galleons, the strategic commodity fuelling global networks was always silver. Giraldez shows how this most important of precious metals shaped world history, with influences that stretch to the present.

Saving Globalization

Saving Globalization
Author: Mike Moore
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2009-12-02
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0470825030

Globalization is not new, nor is it a policy, it’s a process that has existed as long as man looked over the horizon, travelled and traded. It can’t be stopped but it can be slowed. It came to a grinding halt in August 1914 and the Marxist detour cost millions of lives and lost three generations their opportunity and hope in many countries. More wealth has been created in the past 60 years than in all of history. After the most successful decade of sustained economic growth in history, this progress is threatened. Extreme inequality, corruption and environmental degradation threaten the stability and legitimacy of many developing countries’ regimes. Anti-globalization and anti-capitalist campaigners’ confidence has been emboldened due to the present economic crisis. Protectionist rhetoric is growing as are the arguments to control and regulate markets. Leaders are meeting to discuss how to face these problems and create a new international architecture. How did we get to this position? What should we do? What is it that determines why some contemporary states are successful while others have failed? Saving Globalization departs from its analysis of the globalised economy in the twenty-first century to answer these question by tracing the development of what Moore considers to be ‘the big ideas of history’: democracy, independent courts, the separation of church and state, property rights, independent courts, a professional civil service, and civil society. Democratic capitalism has worked for most people. Why? It is a remarkable story, from the Greeks to the Geeks, encompassing technological progress and the corrections and contradictions between liberty and equality, technology, growth and the environment. In defence of the many virtues and opportunities that globalisation offers, Mike Moore makes the case for a fresh and new approach to our international Institutions and for domestic policies that promote equity and fairness. The book controversially attacks the new enemies of reason and evidence. The threats now come from all sides, especially workers in developed countries who fear for their jobs. Mike Moore is a political practitioner turned theoretician.