Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900

Although trade connects distant people and regions, bringing cultures closer together through the exchange of material goods and ideas, it has not always led to unity and harmony. From the era of the Crusades to the dawn of colonialism, exploitation and violence characterized many trading ventures, which required vessels and convoys to overcome tremendous technological obstacles and merchants to grapple with strange customs and manners in a foreign environment. Yet despite all odds, experienced traders and licensed brokers, as well as ordinary people, travelers, pilgrims, missionaries, and interlopers across the globe, concocted ways of bartering, securing credit, and establishing relationships with people who did not speak their language, wore different garb, and worshipped other gods. Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900 focuses on trade across religious boundaries around the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the second millennium. Written by an international team of scholars, the essays in this volume examine a wide range of commercial exchanges, from first encounters between strangers from different continents to everyday transactions between merchants who lived in the same city yet belonged to diverse groups. In order to broach the intriguing yet surprisingly neglected subject of how the relationship between trade and religion developed historically, the authors consider a number of interrelated questions: When and where was religion invoked explicitly as part of commercial policies? How did religious norms affect the everyday conduct of trade? Why did economic imperatives, political goals, and legal institutions help sustain commercial exchanges across religious barriers in different times and places? When did trade between religious groups give way to more tolerant views of "the other " and when, by contrast, did it coexist with hostile images of those decried as "infidels "? Exploring captivating examples from across the world and spanning the course of the second millennium, this groundbreaking volume sheds light on the political, economic, and juridical underpinnings of cross-cultural trade as it emerged or developed at various times and places, and reflects on the cultural and religious significance of the passage of strange persons and exotic objects across the many frontiers that separated humankind in medieval and early modern times. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/religion/9780199379194/toc.html Contributors to this volume - Catia Antunes is Associate Professor of Early Modern Economic and Social History at Leiden University. She is the author of two monographs on early modern globalization: Globalisation in the Early Modern Period: The Economic Relationship between Amsterdam and Lisbon, 1640-1705 and Lisboa e Amesterdao: Um caso de globalizacao na historia moderna. Guillaume Calafat is a former student and fellow of Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris (2003-2008). He is agrege in History (2006) and was Visiting Lecturer of French at the University of California, Los Angeles (2006-07). A current member of the Ecole Francaise de Rome (2011-14) and an associate researcher at Centre de Recherches en Histoire Moderne (Universite Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne), he is completing a Ph.D. thesis on the legal status of the seas, commercial and maritime law, and the emergence of free ports in the early modern Mediterranean. Leor Halevi is Associate Professor of History and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society, a book that won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Award, as well as book prizes given by the Medieval Academy of America and the American Academy of Religion. Wolfgang Kaiser is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Paris 1 (Pantheon Sorbonne) and directeur d'etudes at the EHESS. His authored and edited books include Marseille au temps des troubles: Morphologie sociale et luttes de factions 1559-1596; vol. 3 of Ars mercatoria: Handbucher und Traktate fur den Gebrauch des Kaufmanns, 1470-1820, co-edited with Jochen Hoock and Pierre Jeannin; Gens de passage en Mediterranee, de l'antiquite a l'epoque moderne. Procedures de controle et d'identification, with Claudia Moatti; Le commerce des captifs: Les intermediaires dans l'echange et le rachat des prisonniers en Mediterranee, XVe-XVIIIe siecles; L'Europe en conflits: Les affrontements religieux et la genese de l'Europe moderne (vers 1500-vers 1650); Le monde de l'itinerance en Mediterranee, de l'antiquite a l'epoque moderne: Procedures de controle et d'identification, with Claudia Moatti and Christophe Pebarthe; vol 2 of Les musulmans dans l'histoire de l'Europe, with Jocelyne Dakhlia. Giuseppe Marcocci is Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Viterbo (Italy). His publications include numerous essays and articles in international journals, as well as four books: I custodi dell'ortodossia: Inquisizione e Chiesa nel Portogallo del Cinquecento, L'invenzione di un impero: Politica e cultura nel mondo portoghese, 1450-1600, A consciencia de um imperio: Portugal e o seu mundo, secs. XV-XVII, and (with Jose Pedro Paiva) Historia da Inquisicao portuguesa, 1536-1821. Roxani Eleni Margariti is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University. . She is the author of Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port and co-editor of Histories of the Middle East: Studies in Economy, Society, and Law in Honor of A.L. Udovitch. Peter Mark is Professor of African Art History at Wesleyan University and a member of the graduate faculty in African history at Universidade de Lisboa. He is the author of five books, including The Forgotten Diaspora: Jewish Communities in West Africa and the Making of the Atlantic World, written with Jose da Silva Horta, 'Portuguese' Style and Luso-African Identity: Pre-Colonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries, and The Wild Bull and the Sacred Forest: Form, Meaning, and Change in Senegambian Initiation Masks. Silvia Marzagalli is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and Director of the Centre de la Mediterranee Moderne et Contemporaine in Nice. She is the author of Les boulevards de la fraude: Le negoce maritime et le blocus continental, 1806-1813; Bordeaux, Hambourg, Livourne and, more recently, the co-editor with Michel Biard and Pierre Bourdin of Revolution, Consulat et Empire, with John McCusker and Jim Sofka of Rough Waters: American Involvement with the Mediterranean in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, and with Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire of Atlas de la Revolution francais: Circulations des hommes et des idees, 1770-1804. Kathryn A. Miller is a fellow at Stanford University's Europe Center and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Previous publications include Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of late Medieval Spain and "Physicians of the Book: Jewish and Muslim Medicine in the Middle Ages." David Harris Sacks is the Richard F. Scholz Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College, where he has taught since 1986. Along with publishing a number of articles, essays, review articles, and reviews on aspects of early modern British social, economic, political and intellectual and cultural history and the history of the Atlantic world, he is the author of Trade. Society and Politics in Bristol, 1500-1700 (1985) and of The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700, editor of an edition of Ralph Robynson's sixteenth-century translation into English of Thomas More's Utopia, and, with Donald R. Kelley, of a collection of essays entitled The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1700. Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell University, where he teaches primarily Southeast Asian Studies. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865-1915, which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2007, and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Francesca Trivellato is the Frederick W. Hilles Professor of History at Yale University. She is the author of The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period and Fondamenta dei vetrai: Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento.