Merchant in Asia

Merchant in Asia
Author: E. M. Jacobs
Publisher: Leiden University Press
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2006
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

For much of its two centuries of existence (1602 to 1799), the VOC, the Dutch East India Company was the largest trading company in the world. Although the VOC was established to operate primarily as a trading company, it soon also came to play a prominent military, diplomatic and political role on the Asian stage and eventually it laid the foundations of the Dutch colonial empire in the Indonesian Archipelago. Merchant in Asia is the first study to pay attention to the full breadth and width of the VOC commercial activities in Asia. It looks at the company from the peak of its fame until its final decline at the end of the eighteenth century. The study focuses on the main trade goods - spices, Indian textiles, Chinese tea and Javanese coffee - and their specific by-products. Els Jacobs has analyzed in detail the VOC trade in fifteen of the most important commodities that together made up 85% of the total turnover. This innovative study is based on extensive research of the VOC archives and many other Dutch sources, as well as a detailed quantitative analysis of the VOC bookkeeping records. In the study the author sketches in vivid detail how the merchants of the VOC sold, bought, and even supervised the production of tropical products and how they dealt with Asian suppliers and consumers. In addition, she looks at the range of problems the merchants encountered in the maritime trade from Yemen and Persia in the West to China and Japan in the East, including India, Ceylon, Malacca, and the Indonesian Archipelago.

Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia

Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia
Author: Chi-cheung Choi
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 367
Release: 2019-10-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004408606

In Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia, the contributors put together an important and lucid study of overseas Chinese and Indian merchants and their impacts on the emerging global economy from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. In contrast to the conventional focus on the merchants’ networks per se, the chapters of this volume uncover their “networking,” the process in which they constructed and utilized linkages based on the shared concepts such as caste, kin alliances, and religion. By analyzing the interactions between the merchants and the European and Japanese empires, along with Asian states, this volume provides the critical insights into the configuration of the regional economic order in the past and at present.

Economic Success of Chinese Merchants in Southeast Asia

Economic Success of Chinese Merchants in Southeast Asia
Author: Janet Tai Landa
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2016-11-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3642540198

This book provides an original analysis of the economic success of Overseas Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia: The ethnically homogeneous group of Chinese middlemen is an informal, low-cost organization for the provision of club goods, e.g. contract enforcement, that are essential to merchants’ success. The author’s theory - and various extensions, with emphasis on kinship and other trust relationships - draws on economics and the other social sciences, and beyond to evolutionary biology. Empirical material from her fieldwork forms the basis for developing her unique, integrative and transdisciplinary theoretical framework, with important policy implications for understanding ethnic conflict in multiethnic societies where minority groups dominate merchant roles.

Merchants, Companies and Trade

Merchants, Companies and Trade
Author: Sushil Chaudhury
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2007-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521037471

The main objective of this book is to dispel some of the conventionally-held views surrounding trade between Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, through a comparative and comprehensive study of merchant communities, markets and commodities, the individual authors demonstrate that Asian merchants were in no way inferior to Europeans in terms of their commercial operations and business acumen. The book as a whole attempts to view trade between Europe and Asia in its totality and emphasizes similarities rather than differences in the two regions.

Portuguese Trade in Asia Under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640

Portuguese Trade in Asia Under the Habsburgs, 1580–1640
Author: James C. Boyajian
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2008-02-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780801887543

This fascinating history reassesses the consequences of Portugal's flourishing private trade with Asia, including increased tensions between the growing urban merchant class and the still-dominant landed aristocracy. James C. Boyajian shows how Portuguese-Asian commerce formed part of a global trading network that linked not only Europe and Asia but also—for the first time—Asia, West Africa, Brazil, and Spanish America. He also argues that, contrary to previous scholarly opinion, nearly half of the Portuguese-Asian trade was controlled by New Christians—descendants of Iberian Jews forcibly converted to Christianity in the 1490s.

The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550-1900

The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and Its Trade, 1550-1900
Author: Scott Cameron Levi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Countering the commonly held notion that 17th-century Central Asia was economically isolated after the relative prosperity of the Mongol and Timurid Empires, Levi (Asian history, Eastern Illinois U.) argues that Indian merchants established a diaspora network of commercial communities across urban and rural Central Asia. Not limiting their exchange to the import-export trade, these merchants engaged in a variety of money-lending activities that placed them in a unique socio-economic position that allowed the mainly Hindu merchants to live for extended periods in Muslim countries. Furthermore, these merchants' associations with Indian family firms helped finance transregional trade, rural credit systems, and industrial production throughout Central Asia. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Startup Asia

Startup Asia
Author: Rebecca A. Fannin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0470829907

Showing how entrepreneurs and investors can start up in Asia and go global, the book provides a first-hand, on-the-ground tour of the new technology centers that are gaining momentum all over Asia. Interviews with the most successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs reveal their winning strategies and show how a new generation of entrepreneurs in China and India are no longer looking to the West for their cues - but are instead crafting their own local business models and success strategies.

Wealth And Poverty Of Nations

Wealth And Poverty Of Nations
Author: David S. Landes
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 743
Release: 2015-04-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0349141444

The history of nations is a history of haves and have-nots, and as we approach the millennium, the gap between rich and poor countries is widening. In this engrossing and important new work, eminent historian David Landes explores the complex, fascinating and often startling causes of the wealth and poverty of nations. The answers are found not only in the large forces at work in economies: geography, religion, the broad swings of politics, but also in the small surprising details. In Europe, the invention of spectacles doubled the working life of skilled craftsmen, and played a prominent role in the creation of articulated machines, and in China, the failure to adopt the clock fundamentally hindered economic development. The relief of poverty is vital to the survival of us all. As David Landes brilliantly shows, the key to future success lies in understanding the lessons the past has to teach us - lessons uniquely imparted in this groundbreaking and vital book which exemplifies narrative history at its best.

Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550-1800

Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550-1800
Author: Tamara H. Bentley
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9048535441

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, musical instruments, Chinese bronze coins, unfired ceramic portrait figurines, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian 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. Building reverberations between merchant networks 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.