The main goals of this article are to review historiographical trends and set new directions for late Ottoman history. First, the paper demonstrates that current research on the late Ottoman Empire still operates within the confines of the centre–periphery model, and sustains dualistic and state-centred narratives. Second, I argue that a ‘historical trajectory’ framework is a better analytical tool and empirical strategy. It is spatial, path-dependent, and comparative. With special reference to the Middle Eastern provinces, I show that the Ottoman Empire was characterized by distinct imperial paths during the nineteenth century, each representing an alternative route to state–society and local–global relations. The article further suggests that a trajectory-specific approach can provide new prospects for understanding Eurasian land-based empires from a comparative perspective.

This paper explores the intimate connection between imperialism and a liberal global economy in the late nineteenth century and the inter-war period by distinguishing and disentangling the imperial and political dimensions of the pre-World War I gold standard, and interwar efforts to restore it. By doing so it attempts partial!y to redress the relative neglect of power in historical accounts of the international financial arrangements, and re-balance conventional liberal assumptions about the role of markets and incentives in the consolidation and spread of global institutions such as the gold standard. By re-embedding the intertwined financial histories of the imperial and Atlantic worlds into a global context, perspectives from the empire help develop more historically-situated analyses of global economic institutions and arrangements, and help clarify the many intersecting processes involving both power, in all its forms, and markets, that have historically shaped financial relations and institutions.

The article uses various ways of measuring the efficiency of institutions regulating market exchange, such as interest rates, the skill premium, and the level of market integration, to try to answer the question about the quality of institutions in the different parts of Eurasia in the centuries before the ‘Great Divergence’. It appears that Western Europe, from as early as the late medieval period, had a relatively well-developed set of institutions. By contrast, South and Southeast Asian institutions were much less geared towards well-functioning markets. However, Japan and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed institutions that were relatively efficient, and resulted in relatively high levels of commercial exchange. A number of hypotheses are then reviewed that may help to explain a European head start dating from the late Middle Ages.

This article explores the origins of divergent technological pathways in the early modern world, and the role that artisanal knowledge played in this process. It rejects older explanations based on societal differences in entrepreneurial propensities and incentives, and a more modern one based on factor cost. It argues instead for the importance of conditions that facilitated transactions between complementary skills. In India, the institutional setting within which artisan techniques were learned had made such transactions less likely than in eighteenth-century Europe. The cost of acquiring knowledge, therefore, was relatively high in India.

There has been little in the way of fresh thinking on the Eurasian spice trade since the 1980s, partly due to the crisis in economic history, although recent work has both dealt with the agency of non-European actors and started to take Chinese demand into the equation. Starting with problems specific to the Portuguese re-export trade, this article highlights the role of consumers, using research undertaken on the structures of demand to present a theory of cultural demystification. The Portuguese, it is argued, by opening direct trading links to the sources of supply, broke what amounted to a spell that had sustained the trade from the time of Alexander the Great. In concrete terms, the performance of individual spices is disaggregated, and the appearance of rival pepper products brought under scrutiny. While African peppers failed to consolidate the consumer interest they had generated over the fifteenth century, capsicum peppers rapidly spread to southern Europe, where they were domesticated and hence became invisible to international trade. The success of the capsicum pepper was replicated in West Africa, India, and China.

Fashion was arguably a social phenomenon that emerged in Europe during early modern times, and this paper seeks to determine whether it was unknown in the refined civilizations of the East. The conclusion is that fashion was not a European invention. The analysis of the evolution of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese clothing systems underlines how these societies underwent phases in which, thanks to propitious economic conditions, the accentuated propensity towards consumption stimulated behaviour that challenged the traditional hierarchies of appearance, usually regulated by canons of a prescriptive nature. Fashion was not, therefore, a European invention, but it only fully developed as a social institution in Europe, while in India, China, and Japan it only evolved partially, without being able to obtain full social recognition.