By examining the economic interests of urban merchants and peasant traders, the commodities they exchanged, and the markets and transportation networks they used to engage in trade, the book explores how commerce helped to erode the localism of medieval society and to create enduring institutions and motivations for a more expansive social and economic life.

What is a global market? How does it work? At a time when new crises in world markets cannot be satisfactorily resolved through old ideas, Market Threads presents a detailed analysis of the international cotton trade and argues for a novel and groundbreaking understanding of global markets. The book examines the arrangements, institutions, and power relations on which cotton trading and production depend, and provides an alternative approach to the analysis of pricing mechanisms. Drawing upon research from such diverse places as the New York Board of Trade and the Turkish and Egyptian countrysides, the book explores how market agents from peasants to global merchants negotiate, accept, reject, resist, reproduce, understand, and misunderstand a global market. The book demonstrates that policymakers and researchers must focus on the specific practices of market maintenance in order to know how they operate. Markets do not simply emerge as a relationship among self-interested buyers and sellers, governed by appropriate economic institutions. Nor are they just social networks embedded in wider economic social structures. Rather, global markets are maintained through daily interventions, the production of prosthetic prices, and the waging of struggles among those who produce and exchange commodities. The book illustrates the crucial consequences that these ideas have on economic reform projects and market studies. Spanning a variety of disciplines, Market Threads offers an original look at the world commodity trade and revises prevailing explanations for how markets work.

This study seeks to lay bare the relationship between the sociopolitical structures that shaped peasant lives in Manchuria (northeast China) during the Qing dynasty and the development of that region’s economy. The book is written in three parts. It begins with an analysis of the ideological, political, and economic interests of the Qing ruling house in defending its homeland in the northeast against occupation by non-Manchus, and examines how these interests informed state policy and the reconfiguration of the region’s social landscape in the first decades of the dynasty. The book then addresses how this agrarian configuration unraveled under challenge from settler peasant communities and gives an account of the resulting property and labor regimes. The study ends with an account of how that social formation configured peasant economic behavior and in so doing established the limits of economic change and trade growth.

The Economy of Medieval Hungary is the first concise, English-language volume about the economic life of medieval Hungary. It is a product of the cooperation of specialists representing various disciplines of medieval studies, including archaeologists, archaeozoologists, specialists in medieval demography, historical hydrologists, climate and environmental historians, as well as archivists and church historians. The twenty-five chapters of the book focus on structures of medieval economy, different means and ways of human-nature interactions in production, and offer an overview of the different spheres of economic life, with a particular emphasis on taxation, income and commercial activity. Thanks to its interdisciplinary character, this volume is a basic handbook for the history of economy, production and material culture. Contributors are Krisztina Arany, László Bartosiewicz, Zoltán Batizi, Anna Zsófia Biller, Péter Csippán, László Daróczi-Szabó, Márta Daróczi-Szabó, István Draskóczy, István Feld, László Ferenczi, Erika Gál, Márton Gyöngyössy, István Kenyeres, István Kováts, András Kubinyi, Kyra Lyublyanovics, Árpád Nógrády, Éva Ágnes Nyerges, István Petrovics, Zsolt Pinke, Beatrix F. Romhányi, Katalin Szende, László Szende, Magdolna Szilágyi, Csaba Tóth, and Boglárka Weisz.

Rural life in pre-industrial Quebec was essentially organized around a feudal society. Allan Greer takes a close look at the at society and its economy in three parishes in Lower Richelieu valley – Sorel, St Ours, and St Denis – from 1740 to 1840. He finds a pronounced pattern of household self-sufficiency; as in other peasant societies, the habitants lived mainly from produce grown throught their own efforts on their own lands. How the family-based economy operated and how the household was reproduced over the generations through marriage, birth, inheritance, and colonization, together form a major focus of this study.

This book examines one hundred years of historical debate on the English peasantry in the later Middle Ages, exploring the influences and changes to peasantry society, economy and culture.

In the late Middle Ages the county of Holland experienced a process of uncommonly rapid commercialisation. Comparing Holland to England and Flanders this book examines how the institutions that shaped commodity markets contributed to this remarkable development.