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Participant Biographies

Maxine Berg (maxine.berg@warwick.ac.uk) is Professor of History and Director of the European Research Council Funded Project ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries – Trading Eurasia 1600-1830’ at the University of Warwick. Her major publications include Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (OUP, 2005); ed. with Elizabeth Eger, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Palgrave 2002); ed. with Helen Clifford, Consumers and Luxury in Europe 1650-1850 (Manchester University Press, 1999); ed. With Kristine Bruland, Technological Revolutions in Europe 1760-1860 (Edward Elgar, 1997); The Age of Manufactures. Second Edition (Routledge, 1994); as well as numerous articles in the field of global history including 'In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century', Past and Present, 182, 2004. She has edited Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-first Century (OUP for the British Academy), forthcoming 2013.

Romain Bertrand (bertrand@ceri-sciences-po.org) is Senior Research Fellow with the Center for International Research and Studies in Paris (CERI-Sciences Po). A specialist of early modern and colonial Indonesia, he has published extensively on the history of the multifaceted engagement of Javanese aristocratic polities with the Dutch, both during the "first contact" moment (by the late 1590s) and during the late colonial period (1880-1920). His books include Indonésie, la démocratie invisible. Violence, magie et politique à Java (Paris, Karthala, 2002), La Tradition Parfaite. Etat colonial, noblesse et nationalisme à Java (16e-20e siècle) (Paris, Karthala, 2005), and L'Histoire à parts égales. Récits d'une rencontre Orient-Occident (16e-17e siècle)(Paris, Seuil, 2011) (for a review in English, see http://www.booksandideas.net/The-View-from-Java.html). He teaches Southeast Asian history and the history of early modern Eurasian encounters at Sciences Po Paris and has been a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research (NYC) and a visiting fellow at Oxford (Nuffield College). He's a board member of the quarterly "Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales".

Bruno Blondé (bruno.blonde@ua.ac.be) is Research Professor at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp. His major research interests include the history of transportation, economic growth and social inequality, material culture and consumption. Currently he is, with Ilja Van Damme, writing a new synthesis on the material culture of Antwerp, sixteenth-eighteenth centuries. His recent publications include B. Blondé & I. Van Damme, ‘Retail growth and consumer changes in a declining urban economy: Antwerp (1650-1750)’, The Economic History Review, 63:3(2010), p. 638-663; B. Blondé. & J.Hanus., ‘Beyond Building Craftsmen. Economic Growth and Living Standards in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries. The case of ‘s-Hertogenbosch (1500-1560’), European Review of Economic History - ISSN 1361-4916 - 14:2(2010), pp. 179-207; B. Blondé, ‘Entre cheval et chose banale. Anvers et les paradoxes de la naissance de la consommation, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle’, in : La grande chevauchée : faire de l’histoire avec Daniel Roche / Milliot, Vincent [edit.]; e.a. - ISBN 978-2-600-01505-9 - Genève, Droz, 2011, p. 181-203 ; B. Blondé. ‘At the cradle of the transport revolution? Paved roads, traffic flows and economic development in eighteenth-century Brabant,’ in Journal of Transport History - 31:1 (2010), pp. 89-111.

Helen Clifford is currently Museum Consultant to the 'Europe's Asian Centuries' project, and a member of the 'East India Company at Home 1757-1857' project which began in the Global HIstory Centre at Warwick and is now based at University College London. She combines her academic work with running the Swaledale Museum in Reeth, North Yorkshire and freelance research, writing, and exhibition curation in the field of seventeenth and eighteenth century luxury goods.

Natacha Coquery (natacha.coquery@wanadoo.fr) is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Lyon (France). Her work focuses on the luxury and semi-luxury market in eighteenth-century Paris. She is the author of L’hôtel aristocratique. Le marché du luxe à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998) and Tenir Boutique. Luxe et demi-luxe à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Comité des Travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2011). She is the co-editor of several books, including most recently, with Bruno Blondé, Eugénie Briot, Laura Van Aert, Retailers and consumer changes in Early Modern Europe. England, France, Italy and the Low Countries (PUFR, 2005), with Bruno Blondé, Jon Stobart et Ilja Vandamme, Fashioning Old and New. Changing Consumer Patterns in Western Europe (1650-1900) (Brepols, 2009) and with Isabelle Paresys, Se vêtir à la cour en Europe (1400-1815) (Centre de recherche du château de Versailles/Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2011).

Meike Fellinger (M.Fellinger@warwick.ac.uk) is a PhD researcher at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is part of the ‘Europe's Asian Centuries' project. Entitled ‘Beyond company control: merchant mariners and European private trade in Chinese export wares, 1720-1770’, it looks at the private trade activities of British supercargoes and commanders of East Indiamen, in particular at their networks and business organization in Europe. Before commencing her PhD research, Meike obtained her B.A. in Cultural Studies at the European University Viadriana (Germany) before moving to Warwick for an MA in Global History, with an MA thesis on the material culture of returning Anglo-Indians in the late eighteenth century, supervised by Professor David Arnold.

Anne Gerritsen (A.T.Gerritsen@warwick.ac.uk) is Associate Professor (Reader) in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. She currently serves as the Director of the Warwick-based Global History and Culture Centre, and has recently completed the AHRC-funded project ‘Global Jingdezhen: Local Manufactures and Early Modern Global Connections’, which aimed to cast new light on the ways in which the southern Chinese city of Jingdezhen was linked to the early modern world. She has also published on the local culture of Ji’an prefecture in Jiangxi, and is working on a study that brings together local and global approaches to the study of history. Her publications include ‘Material Culture and the Other: European Encounters with Chinese Porcelain, c. 1650-1800’, Journal of World History, 23 (2012), 87-113 (with Stephen McDowall); ‘Fragments of a Global Past: Ceramics Manufacture in Song-Yuan Ming Jingdezhen’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 52 (2009), 117-152; and Ji’an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China (Brill, 2007).

Jos J.L. Gommans (j.j.l.gommans@hum.leidenuniv.nl) is Professor of Colonial and Global History at Leiden University. He is the author of two monographs on early-modern South Asian history: The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 1710-1780, (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1999) and Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire (London: Routledge 2002). He edited several volumes on South Asia’s interaction with the outside world (with Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Europe) and produced various Dutch source publications including one archival inventory and two historical VOC-atlases. From 2000-2010 he served as editor / editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and he has recently joined the editorial board of Itinerario. As (co-)director of the NWO-Horizon project on Eurasian Empires (http://hum.leiden.edu/history/eurasia) and the Cosmopolis-programme (http://hum.leiden.edu/history/cosmopolisprojects) his current work takes a global and connective turn by exploring various early-modern manifestations of Eurasian Cosmopolitanism.

Felicia Gottmann (f.gottmann@warwick.ac.uk) studied at the Universities of Oxford and Toulouse, receiving her D.Phil from the former in 2010 for her thesis entitled ‘The Eighteenth-Century Luxury Debate: the Case of Voltaire’. Since then she has worked as a research fellow as part of the project ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries – Trading Eurasia 1600-1830’ at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the role of Asian textile in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a particular interest in the fields of political economy and Enlightenment thought.

Hanna Hodacs (h.hodacs@warwick.ac.uk) is currently working on two postdoctoral projects, one as part of the project ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries – Trading Eurasia 1600-1830’ at the University of Warwick (researching early modern Eurasian trade and the Scandinavian East India Companies) and one at the Center for History of Science, Royal Swedish Academy of Science, Stockholm, where she is working on a project on Swedish naturalists in late 18th century London. She has previously worked on natural history teaching and travelling in 18^th century Sweden as well as on evangelicalism and Anglo-Swedish contacts in the 19th century. The latter was the main topic of her doctoral dissertation (2003, University of Uppsala, Sweden).

Kevin Le Doudic (kevinledoudic@gmail.com) is PhD Candidate in Modern History at the Universite de Bretagne-Sud and works on the encounter between Asia and West in the material culture of the French in the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth century. His research topics are: definition and evolution of the notion of exoticism and of hybrid cultures; logics and motivations in the consumption and in the interior furnishing; social and cultural dynamics in the French Trading Posts in India; integration mechanisms in social and commercial networks through the material culture.

Andrew MacKillop (amackillop@abdn.ac.uk), Department of History, University of Aberdeen, studies the integration of Scotland into the Asian hemisphere of England’s colonial system, exploring how Scots infiltrated the government, military, and mercantile systems of the English East India Company, and the profound effects this involvement had upon all aspects of Scottish political, social, economic, and cultural life. His recent publications on this subject include: ‘Locality, Nation, and Empire: The Scots and the British Empire in Asia, c.1690-1813’, in John M. MacKenzie & T.M. Devine (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Scotland & the British Empire (Oxford, 2011) ; and ‘“A Reticent People”?: The Welsh in British Asia, 1700-1815’, in Huw V. Bowen (ed.), Wales and The British Overseas Empire, 1680-1830 (Manchester, 2011).

John McAleer (mcaleer.john@gmail.com)  is Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton. For six years, he was Curator of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. During his time at the NMM, he was involved in exhibitions on both the Atlantic and Asian trading worlds. He is the author of Representing Africa: Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780–1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010) and (with H. V. Bowen and Robert J. Blyth) Monsoon Traders: The Maritime World of the East India Company (London: Scala, 2011). A collection of essays, co-edited with Sarah Longair, on Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience will be published in October 2012.

Anne E.C. McCants (ammcants@mit.edu) is Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow and Director of the Concourse Freshmen Learning Community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches European economic and social history and social science research methods. She is the author of Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (1997), and numerous articles on historical demography, material culture, and the standard of living in the Dutch Republic. She is currently working on an economic and institutional history of the movement to build cathedrals and other major churches in the Gothic style in North-western Europe in the twelth and thirteenth centuries.

Leos Müller (leos.muller@historia.su.se) is Director of the CEMAS, the Centre for Maritime Studies, and professor in History at Stockholm University. His major research interests relate to Sweden's foreign trade and shipping in early modern period (1600-1800), Sweden's trade in the Mediterranean Sea and the diplomatic relations between Sweden and North Africa, the Swedish East India Company, neutrality in maritime context, maritime international order and small states. His latest book on the Swedish consular service and shipping in southern Europe and the Atlantic (2004) has been well received and broadly reviewed. He has been engaged in the debate about global history in Scandinavia and recently edited text book on global history from a Nordic periphery. He is currently working on a Scandinavian eighteenth-century neutrality and shipping, the different concepts of neutrality and the League of Armed Neutrality 1780-1783. He is leading the Maritime Seminar at Vasa Museum, Stockholm. He was editor in chief of Forum navale (2001-2010), the journal of Swedish Society for Maritime History, and edited a number of volumes published by this society. He is member of the Editorial Board of International Journal of Maritime History, and of the steering committee of Swedish Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Sofia Murhem (sofia.murhem@ekshst.uu.se) is Associate Professor in Economic History at Uppsala University. Her research interests include second-hand consumption, pawn-broking and industrial relations.

Ghulam A. Nadri (gnadri@gsu.edu) is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA. He specialises in the history of early modern South Asia (17^th-19^th centuries) and studies its society and economy in the larger framework of the Indian Ocean world and global history. Besides his book, Eighteenth-Century Gujarat: The Dynamics of Its Political Economy, 1750-1800, he has published several research papers and book reviews in different journals, books, and proceedings. Currently, he holds the Newton International Fellowship at the Economic History department of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), U.K. His new research project ‘The Political Economy of the Indigo Production and Trade in India, 1500-1900’ explores the history of commercial indigo and investigates the trajectory of its production and trade from the perspectives of India’s political economy, early-modern globalization, and colonialism.

Brigitte Nicolas (bnicolas@mairie-lorient.fr)  is Director and Curator of the Musée de la Compagnie des Indes in Lorient, France. Her research interests lie in French imported Asian textiles and their impact in France as well as in the role of prestigious private orders placed with the French East India Company. Her recent publications and exhibitions include Les portes de la Chine, catalogue de l’exposition éponyme organisée en partenariat avec le musée d’art de Hongkong, Juin-septembre 2004 (musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Ouest imprimerie, Lorient, 2004) ; Carnet du Mékong (musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Ville de Lorient, 2005) ; Le goût de l’Inde, sous la direction de Gérard le Bouédec et Brigitte Nicolas, recueil des actes du colloque éponyme, Lorient, 5-6 juin 2007 (Presses universitaires de Rennes-Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, 2008) ; Féérie Indienne, des rivages de l’Inde au royaume de France, catalogue de l’exposition éponyme, Musée de l’impression sur étoffe, Mulhouse, Nov 2008- Mai 2009 ; Musée de la Compagnie des Indes, Lorient, Juin – Décembre 2009. Sous la direction de Jacqueline Jacqué et Brigitte Nicolas (Somogy, 2008) ; De Lorient à L’Orient, château royal de Blois, Octobre-Novembre, 2011 ; and L’Odyssée de l’Imari, Hôtel Gabriel, Lorient, Juin-Septembre 2012.

Chris Nierstrasz (J.C.Nierstrasz@warwick.ac.uk) is currently a research fellow in the Europe’s Asian Centuries project at the University of Warwick. During his PhD, he was part of the TANAP-program at Leiden University, where he defended his thesis in 2008. In 2012, his thesis will be published as a book, entitled ‘In the Shadow of the Company: The Dutch East India Company and its Servants in the Period of its Decline (1740-1796)’. He has previously worked on private trade and on comparisons between the Dutch and English East India Companies. Currently, he is interested in a comparison between the trade to Europe of the Dutch and English East India Companies.

Om Prakash (prakash.dse@gmail.com) gained a BA in Economics at the University of Delhi, an MA in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics and a PhD in Economic History at the Delhi School of Economics. He has since held a number of prestigious positions, including most recently at the Delhi School of Economics as Head of the Department of Economics (1989-92), Director (2001-2) and Professor of Economic History. Professor Prakash is an elected Member of the Executive Committee, International Economic History Association (2002-2009). He has been a permanent Foreign Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, since 2000 and has been a permanent Foreign Member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, Haarlem, The Netherlands, since 1992. He was also Associate Editor of the Indian Economic and Social History Review from 1965 to 1996. His most recent publications include Co-editor (with D.P. Chattopadhyaya), The Trading World of the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800, vol. 3, part 7 of the History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization series. (New Delhi: Pearson. 2012); The Dutch factories in India: a collection of Dutch East India Company documents pertaining to India. Vol. II, 1624-1627. (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers 2007); Bullion For Goods, European and Indian Merchants in the Indian Ocean Trade, 1500-1800. (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 2004); Euro-Asian Encounter in the Early Modern Period (Kuala Lumpur: Sephis-University of Malaya, 2003); 2003 Co-editor (with Jos J.L. Gommans), European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India, vol. II.5 in the New Cambridge History of India series. ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000 - Paperback edition of 1998 publication.); ed. with Denys Lombard, Commerce and Culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800 (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1999); and European Commercial Expansion in Early Modern Asia, vol. X in the Expanding World series. Hampshire, UK: Variorum, 1997).

Olivier Raveux (raveux@mmsh.univ-aix.fr) is a researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Aix-en-Provence (UMR TELEMME-Aix-Marseille Université). His works focuss on trade and technology networks in the 17^th–century Mediterranean. His main publications include Entre réseau communautaire intercontinental et intégration locale : la colonie marseillaise des marchands arméniens de la Nouvelle-Djoulfa (Ispahan), 1669-1695 , Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 59-1, 2012, 81-100 ; Adaptación tecnológica y cambios en la localización industrial: una revisión de las investigaciones sobre la industria de hilados de algodón en Cataluña (1772-1885) , Investigaciones de Historia Económica, n°17, 2010, 65-94 (with Alex Sánchez) and The Birth of a New European Industry : l’indiennage in Seventeenth-Century Marseilles in Riello (Giorgio) et Parthasarathi (Prasannan) (dir.), The Spinning World : A Global History of Cotton Textile, 1200-1850, Oxford, OUP-Pasold Research Fund, 2009, 291-306.

Giorgio Riello (G.Riello@warwick.ac.uk) teaches Global History at the University of Warwick. He is the author of A Foot in the Past (Oxford UP 2006) and has edited several books on the history of textiles, dress, fashion and design in early modern Europe and Asia among which The Spinning World (with P. Parthasarathi) (Oxford UP 2009; pb 2012); How India Clothed the World (with T. Roy) (Brill 2009; pb 2012) and Global Design History (with G. Adamson and S. Teasley)(Routledge, 2011). He recently completed a book entitled Global Cotton: How an Asian Fibre Changed the European Economy (Cambridge UP, forthcoming 2013).

Wouter Ryckbosch is a temporary lecturer in Early Modern History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), and a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent University (Belgium). His research focuses on social structures and change during the early modern era and its relation to material culture and economic growth. In 2012 he successfully defended his PhD thesis “A consumer revolution under strain? Consumption, wealth and status in eighteenth-century Aalst (Southern Netherlands),” in which he seeks to question the close association between eighteenth-century consumer change on the one hand, and early modern economic and social ‘modernization’ on the other

François-Joseph Ruggiu (francois_joseph_ruggiu@hotmail.com) is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and is a specialist of social and family history. He has extensively published about nobilities and middle classes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century towns. Since the beginning of the 2000s, he has developed, through different articles, a growing interest for the French and English colonial societies and especially for their elites: La noblesse du Canada aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles , Histoire, Economie et Société, n°4, 2008, p. 67-85; Extraction, wealth and industry: The ideas of noblesse and of gentility in the English and French Atlantics (17th–18th centuries, History of European Ideas, 34:4, 2008 ; Une noblesse atlantique ? Le second ordre français de l’Ancien au Nouveau Monde, Outre-Mers, tome 97, n° 362-362, 2009, p. 39-63; and The kingdom of France and its overseas nobilities , French History, 2011, 25(3), p. 298-315. He is also trying to reevaluate the management of the first French colonial Empire by the metropolitan authorities during the second half of the eigheenth-century (India and the Reshaping of the French Colonial Policy (1759-1789), Itinerario. International Journal on the History of European Expansion, vol. XXXV, issue 2, 2011, 25-43 ; Falling into oblivion. Canada and the French Monarchy, 1759-1783”, in Revisiting 1759: The Conquest of Canada in Historical Perspective, ed. Phillip Buckner and John G. Reid, University of Toronto Press, 2012). Since 2010, he is Deputy Director of the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (CNRS).

 Dagmar Schäfer (Dagmar.schaefer@manchester.ac.uk) is Director of the Centre for Chinese Studies, Chair Chinese Studies University of Manchester, U.K.. She is a specialist in the History of Chinese science and technology and received her Ph.D. from the University of Würzburg, Germany in 1996 and worked and studied at the Zhejiang University PRChina, the Ts’inghua University ROC, the University of Pennsylvannia, U.S.A. and the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany. Her publications include The Crafting of the 10,000 Things (University of Chicago Press, 2011), and Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in China (Brill, 2012).

Göran Ulväng (goran.ulvang@ekhist.uu.se) has a PhD in economic history, Uppsala University, and is currently researcher at the Department of Economic History. His research interests include second-hand consumption, material culture, pawn-broking and agricultural history.

Tijl Vanneste ( tijl.vanneste@eui.eu) is a Belgian historian who obtained his PhD in 2009 at the European University Institute in Florence, with a thesis entitled Commercial Culture and Merchant Networks: Eighteenth-Century Diamond Traders in Global History, under the supervision of Prof. Diogo Ramada Curto. After his time in Italy, he has worked as postdoctoral researcher for Oxford Brookes University on medico-legal expertise in Ancien Régime France and for Utrecht University on the project There’s Something About Diamonds…The Role of Formal and Informal Institutions in the Organization of the Diamond Trade in Pre-industrial Europe. He has spent time at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, at Berkeley and most recently at Yale University, with a Beinecke Fellowship. Currently, he is an associated researcher in the working group ‘Identités, Cultures, Territoires’ at Université’ Paris-VII Diderot and at the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. From October onwards, he will be a research fellow at Exeter University’s Centre for Maritime Historical Studies, working with Prof. Maria Fusaro on the project Sailing into modernity: Comparative Perspectives on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century European Economic Transition. He has published his first monograph in 2011, with Pickering & Chatto, and his research continues to focus on the development of modernity, economically as well as culturally, on identity within diaspora movements and on Brazilian history.

Xu Xiaodong (xiaodongcuhk@gmail.com) is a Research Associate at the Department of Antiquities of The Palace Museum in Beijing having studied at Peking University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests lie in Ancient Chinese jade, gold, and in artistic interactions between ancient China and the west. Her recent publications include The Jade of Liao dynasty (The Forbidden City Press, 2003), Ancient Chinese Amber Art (The Forbidden City Press, 2001), as well as several essays and articles including ‘A study on Hindustan and Mughal Jades’, Gugong Xuekan (Forbidden City Academic Journal), 2011; ‘Interactions of painted enamel technique between the imperial workshop and the local during the reigns of Kangxi and Yongzheng’, Between the Court and the local: technological interactions during 17^th -18^th centuries in China (The Forbidden City Press, 2011), and ‘Thumb ring, thumb ring-shaped pendant and banzhi ring’, Gugong Bowuyuan Yuankan (Forbidden City Journal), 2012.