Global Economic and Material History (Giorgio Riello)
For discussion
- Are there such things as a ‘global commodities’ in the period before 1800? And if so, in what ways are they different from today’s global commodities?
- Which commodities were globally exchanged in the early modern period? And what issues do they raise? [consider one or more commodity]
- How did material objects connect different areas of the world?
- While Europe and Asia became increasingly connected through the exchange of things, their economies diverged. Why?
Readings
Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, ‘Global Material Cultures: Things in History’ (Unpublished paper, June 2008). [copies will be distributed], or
Craig Clunas, ‘Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West’, American Historical Review, 104/5 (1999), pp. 1497-1511. (even better if you read both)
Further Readings
Please read at least two of these readings
Donald Quataert (ed.), Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1922: An Introduction (Albany, 2000), introduction.
John Styles, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), pp. 124-169.
Jeremy Prestholt, ‘The Global Repercussions of Consumerism: East African Consumers and Industrialization’, American Historical Review, 109/3 (2004), pp. 755-782.
Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, ‘East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Eurasia in the Early Modern Period’ , Journal of Social History, 41/4 (2008), pp. 887-916.
John E. Wills, ‘European Consumption and Asian Production in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Brewer and Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods, ch. 6 [HS 2200.C6]