China and Maritime Europe, 1500–1800 looks at early modern China in some of its most complicated and intriguing relations with a world of increasing global interconnection. New World silver, Chinese tea, Jesuit astronomers at the Chinese court, and merchants and marauders of all kinds play important roles here. Although pieces of these stories have been told before, these chapters provide the fullest and clearest available summaries, based on sources in Chinese and in European languages, making this information accessible to students and scholars interested in the growing connections among continents and civilizations in the early modern period.

Published to accompany an exhibition held at the V & A, 23 September - 5 December 2004.

When Portuguese explorers first arrived in India, the maritime passage initiated an exchange of goods as well as ideas. European ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars who followed produced a body of knowledge that shaped European thought about India. Sanjay Subrahmanyam tracks these changing ideas over the entire early modern period.

This enthralling book offers a new approach to Indian economic history, placing trade and mercantile activity in the region within a global framework.

Sea Rovers, Silver, and Samurai traces the roots of modern global East Asia by focusing on the fascinating history of its seaways. The East Asian maritime realm, from the Straits of Malacca to the Sea of Japan, has been a core region of international trade for millennia, but during the long seventeenth century (1550 to 1700), the velocity and scale of commerce increased dramatically. Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese smugglers and pirates forged autonomous networks and maritime polities; they competed and cooperated with one another and with powerful political and economic units, such as the Manchu Qing, Tokugawa Japan, the Portuguese and Spanish crowns, and the Dutch East India Company. Maritime East Asia was a contested and contradictory place, subject to multiple legal, political, and religious jurisdictions, and a dizzying diversity of cultures and ethnicities, with dozens of major languages and countless dialects. Informal networks based on kinship ties or patron-client relations coexisted uneasily with formal governmental structures and bureaucratized merchant organizations. Subsistence-based trade and plunder by destitute fishermen complemented the grand dreams of sea-lords, profit-maximizing entrepreneurs, and imperial contenders. Despite their shifting identities, East Asia’s mariners sought to anchor their activities to stable legitimacies and diplomatic traditions found outside the system, but outsiders, even those armed with the latest military technology, could never fully impose their values or plans on these often mercurial agents. With its multilateral perspective of a world in flux, this volume offers fresh, wide-ranging narratives of the “rise of the West” or “the Great Divergence.” European mariners, who have often been considered catalysts of globalization, were certainly not the most important actors in East and Southeast Asia. China’s maritime traders carried more in volume and value than any other nation, and the China Seas were key to forging the connections of early globalization—as significant as the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean basin. Today, as a resurgent China begins to assert its status as a maritime power, it is important to understand the deep history of maritime East Asia.

The history of the economic contacts between Asia and Europe dates back to at least the early years of the Common Era. But it was only after the overcoming of the transport technology barrier to the growth of trade between the two continents following the discovery by the Portuguese at the end of the 15th century of the all-water route to the East Indies that these contacts became regular and quantitatively significant. The Portuguese were joined at the beginning of the 17th century by the Dutch and the English East India companies. The Europeans operated in the Indian Ocean alongside the Indian and other Asian merchants with no special privileges being available to them. The present collection of essays by Professor Om Prakash first deals with the Indian merchants’ participation in the Indian Ocean trade on the eve of the Europeans’ arrival in the Ocean. The subsequent essays include a discussion of the Portuguese involvement in the Euro-Asian and the Indian Ocean trade. Attention is then turned to the trading activities of the Dutch and the English East India companies. The volume also contains essays on textile manufacturing and trade as well as on coinage and wages in India. The concluding essay deals with trade and politics in the province of Bengal.

This volume suggests a new way of doing global history. Instead of offering a sweeping and generalizing overview of the past, we propose a ‘micro-spatial’ approach, combining micro-history with the concept of space. A focus on primary sources and awareness of the historical discontinuities and unevennesses characterizes the global history that emerges here. We use labour as our lens in this volume. The resulting micro-spatial history of labour addresses the management and recruitment of labour, its voluntary and coerced spatial mobility, its political perception and representation and the workers’ own agency and social networks. The individual chapters are written by contributors whose expertise covers the late medieval Eastern Mediterranean to present-day Sierra Leone, through early modern China and Italy, eighteenth-century Cuba and the Malvinas/Falklands, the journeys of a missionary between India and Brazil and those of Christian captives across the Ottoman empire and Spain. The result is a highly readable volume that addresses key theoretical and methodological questions in historiography. Chapter 7 is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.