Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Asia, especially India, around 1500
- Part II Routes, markets and merchants
- 3 The route through Quandahar: the significance of the overland trade from India to the West in the seventeenth century
- 4 The Armenian merchant network: overall autonomy and local integration
- 5 Commercial relations between India and the Ottoman Empire (late fifteenth to late eighteenth centuries): a few notes and hypotheses
- 6 Eastern and Western merchants from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries
- 7 The other ‘species’ world: speciation of commodities and moneys, and the knowledge-base of commerce, 1500–1900
- Part III European presence in Asia
- Part IV Implications of trade: Asia and Europe
- Index
7 - The other ‘species’ world: speciation of commodities and moneys, and the knowledge-base of commerce, 1500–1900
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Asia, especially India, around 1500
- Part II Routes, markets and merchants
- 3 The route through Quandahar: the significance of the overland trade from India to the West in the seventeenth century
- 4 The Armenian merchant network: overall autonomy and local integration
- 5 Commercial relations between India and the Ottoman Empire (late fifteenth to late eighteenth centuries): a few notes and hypotheses
- 6 Eastern and Western merchants from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries
- 7 The other ‘species’ world: speciation of commodities and moneys, and the knowledge-base of commerce, 1500–1900
- Part III European presence in Asia
- Part IV Implications of trade: Asia and Europe
- Index
Summary
‘…nul autre univers n'est donné que celui des espèces et des genres.’
The task
The following essay is a fast jog through an extremely complex and diverse set of subject matters. I identify a commercial/monetary problem, and allow the search for an explanation to unfold an unexpected route from merchant books into language dictionaries and ‘creationist’ philosophy, thence into peasant agronomy and the evolution of botanical descriptions and classifications, and finally into the unending problems of biology's attempts to understand its object field, before returning to the problems of interpreting contemporary perspectives on monetary and commercial order. This journey astonished me at every stage and brought forth a train of unexpected dissonances and findings, only some of which can be touched upon here. Given strict editorial guidelines, I give maximum space to the argument, omit detailed references, and refer only to examples or types of source.
The marketing continuum
The central concern is with the names, terms and categories encountered by participants in market-places right across the Old World between Ningbo and Nantes, Riga and Onitsha. What was their relationship to the physical world of traded goods and moneys that was the central concern of producers and traders?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Merchants, Companies and TradeEurope and Asia in the Early Modern Era, pp. 145 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999