Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World

Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World PDF Author: Christof Dejung
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317296192
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market provides a new perspective on economic globalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of understanding the emergence of global markets as a mere result of supply and demand or as the effect of imperial politics, this book focuses on a global trading firm as an exemplary case of the actors responsible for conducting economic transactions in a multicultural business world. The study focuses on the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important trading houses in British India after the late nineteenth century and became one of the biggest cotton and coffee traders in the world after decolonization. The book examines the following questions: How could European merchants establish business contacts with members of the mercantile elite from India, China or Latin America? What role did a shared mercantile culture play for establishing relations of trust? How did global business change with the construction of telegraph lines and railways and the development of economic institutions such as merchant banks and commodity exchanges? And what was the connection between the business interests of transnationally operating capitalists and the territorial aspirations of national and imperial governments? Based on a five-year-long research endeavor and the examination of 24 public and private archives in seven countries and on three continents, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market goes well beyond a mere company history as it highlights the relationship between multinationally operating firms and colonial governments, and the role of business culture in establishing notions of trust, both within the firm and between economic actors in different parts of the world. It thus provides a cutting-edge history of globalization from a micro-perspective. Following an actor-theoretical perspective, the book maintains that the global market that came into being in the nineteenth century can be perceived as the consequence of the interaction of various actors. Merchants, peasants, colonial bureaucrats and industrialists were all involved in spinning the individual threads of this commercial web. By connecting established approaches from business history with recent scholarship in the fields of global and colonial history, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market offers a new perspective on the emergence of global enterprise and provides an important addition to the history of imperialism and economic globalization.

Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World

Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World PDF Author: Christof Dejung
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317296192
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book Here

Book Description
Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market provides a new perspective on economic globalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of understanding the emergence of global markets as a mere result of supply and demand or as the effect of imperial politics, this book focuses on a global trading firm as an exemplary case of the actors responsible for conducting economic transactions in a multicultural business world. The study focuses on the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important trading houses in British India after the late nineteenth century and became one of the biggest cotton and coffee traders in the world after decolonization. The book examines the following questions: How could European merchants establish business contacts with members of the mercantile elite from India, China or Latin America? What role did a shared mercantile culture play for establishing relations of trust? How did global business change with the construction of telegraph lines and railways and the development of economic institutions such as merchant banks and commodity exchanges? And what was the connection between the business interests of transnationally operating capitalists and the territorial aspirations of national and imperial governments? Based on a five-year-long research endeavor and the examination of 24 public and private archives in seven countries and on three continents, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market goes well beyond a mere company history as it highlights the relationship between multinationally operating firms and colonial governments, and the role of business culture in establishing notions of trust, both within the firm and between economic actors in different parts of the world. It thus provides a cutting-edge history of globalization from a micro-perspective. Following an actor-theoretical perspective, the book maintains that the global market that came into being in the nineteenth century can be perceived as the consequence of the interaction of various actors. Merchants, peasants, colonial bureaucrats and industrialists were all involved in spinning the individual threads of this commercial web. By connecting established approaches from business history with recent scholarship in the fields of global and colonial history, Commodity Trading, Globalization and the Colonial World: Spinning the Web of the Global Market offers a new perspective on the emergence of global enterprise and provides an important addition to the history of imperialism and economic globalization.

Trading Spaces

Trading Spaces PDF Author: Emma Hart
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022665981X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Looks at the shift from the marketplace as an actual place to a theoretical idea and how this shaped the early American economy. When we talk about the economy, “the market” is often just an abstraction. While the exchange of goods was historically tied to a particular place, capitalism has gradually eroded this connection to create our current global trading systems. In Trading Spaces, Emma Hart argues that Britain’s colonization of North America was a key moment in the market’s shift from place to idea, with major consequences for the character of the American economy. Hart’s book takes in the shops, auction sites, wharves, taverns, fairs, and homes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America—places where new mechanisms and conventions of trade arose as Europeans re-created or adapted continental methods to new surroundings. Since those earlier conventions tended to rely on regulation more than their colonial offspring did, what emerged in early America was a less-fettered brand of capitalism. By the nineteenth century, this had evolved into a market economy that would not look too foreign to contemporary Americans. To tell this complex transnational story of how our markets came to be, Hart looks back farther than most historians of US capitalism, rooting these markets in the norms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. Perhaps most important, this is not a story of specific commodity markets over time but rather is a history of the trading spaces themselves: the physical sites in which the grubby work of commerce occurred and where the market itself was born.

Creating Global Capitalism

Creating Global Capitalism PDF Author: Espen Storli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040129943
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
This book provides a unique insight into the world of commodity trading companies, often depicted as the hidden companies of the global economy and showcases how they were instrumental in bringing about the economic integration of new commodities and far-flung regions into the first global economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The late nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented phase of global economic integration. As organisers of global trade, trading companies specialising in commodities were instrumental in creating this first global economy. From soybeans to cultural artefacts, from seal hides to rubber, trading companies connected far-flung regions at or beyond the frontier of empires to a growing global market for these commodities. Satisfying the unsatiable appetite for commodities of industrializing economies in North America, Europe and East Asia, their nimble organisations and specialised trading skills allowed trading companies to harness imperial geopolitics, latch onto local networks and move across borders. This book brings together a collection of case studies of commodity trading companies across a range of commodities and regions between the 1870s and the 1930s. Through the lens of global value chains, the contributions showcase how these companies continuously adapted their businesses to a world that was at once economically more integrated but politically increasingly competitive in this age of high imperialism and national competition. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Business History.

Oxford Handbook of Commodities History

Oxford Handbook of Commodities History PDF Author: Stubbs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197502679
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 753

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Book Description
"Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodities history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local and global historical analysis. This Oxford Handbook features contributions from scholars involved in these developments across a range of countries and linguistic regions. They discuss the state of the art in their fields, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research. Each of its 31 chapters focuses on an important thematic area within commodities history: key approaches, global histories, modes of production, people and land, environmental impact, consumption, and new methodologies. Taken together, the Oxford Handbook of Commodities History offers insight into the directions in which commodities history is heading, and the multiple ways in which it can contribute to a better understanding of the world"--

Prisms of Work

Prisms of Work PDF Author: Michael Rösser
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111218961
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description


The Global Bourgeoisie

The Global Bourgeoisie PDF Author: Christof Dejung
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691195838
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This essay collection presents a global history of the middle class and its rise around the world during the age of empire. It compares middle-class formation in various regions, highlighting differences and similarities, and assesses the extent to which bourgeois growth was tied to the increasing exchange of ideas and goods and was a result of international connections and entanglements. Grouped by theme, the book shows how bourgeois values can shape the liberal world order.

The Interwar World

The Interwar World PDF Author: Andrew Denning
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100091948X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 735

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Book Description
The Interwar World collects an international group of over 50 contributors to discuss, analyze, and interpret this crucial period in twentieth-century history. A comprehensive understanding of the interwar era has been limited by Euro-American approaches and strict adherence to the temporal limits of the world wars. The volume’s contributors challenge the era’s accepted temporal and geographic framings by privileging global processes and interactions. Each contribution takes a global, thematic approach, integrating world regions into a shared narrative. Three central questions frame the chapters. First, when was the interwar? Viewed globally, the years 1918 and 1939 are arbitrary limits, and the volume explicitly engages with the artificiality of the temporal framework while closely examining the specific dynamics of the 1920s and 1930s. Second, where was the interwar? Contributors use global history methodologies and training in varied world regions to decenter Euro-American frameworks, engaging directly with the usefulness of the interwar as both an era and an analytical category. Third, how global was the interwar? Authors trace accelerating connections in areas such as public health and mass culture counterbalanced by processes of economic protectionism, exclusive nationalism, and limits to migration. By approaching the era thematically, the volume disaggregates and interrogates the meaning of the ‘global’ in this era. As a comprehensive guide, this volume offers overviews of key themes of the interwar period for undergraduates, while offering up-to-date historiographical insights for postgraduates and scholars interested in this pivotal period in global history.

Co-operation and Globalisation

Co-operation and Globalisation PDF Author: Anthony Webster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351386123
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Globalisation is associated with capitalist multinationals dedicated to the enrichment of wealthy, corporate shareholders. However, less well known is that the English and Scottish Co-operative Wholesale Societies, owned by the growing number of local co-operative societies across the country, were early leaders in global commerce. Owned by their working-class members, by 1900 there were over 1,000 societies and millions of individual members. Spreading profits widely through the ‘divi’ which rewarded members shopping at the co-op store, and selling safe and wholesome food, the co-operative movement was a successful part of the emerging labour movement. This success depended on the wholesale societies supplying societies with commodities from all over the world. Because local societies were free to source produce from whoever they chose, competitive pressures required the wholesale societies to develop the world’s most formidable network of international supply chains, with branches, depots, plantations and factories in the USA, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Greece, France, Germany, India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand, colonial West Africa and Argentina. This book explains how the wholesales developed and managed these networks, giving them a competitive advantage in their dealings with the local societies. It will explore why and how this ‘People’s Global Colossus’ declined in the later 20th century, and how its focus in international commerce moved onto ethical sourcing, investment and Fair Trade. Integral to these global networks were the UK movement’s relations with foreign co-operative movements, especially through involvement in the International Co-operative Alliance, and promotion of co-operatives in the Empire by successive British governments as a tool for economic development. The ‘People’s Colossus’ was thus a political as well as a commercial player in the increasingly complex world of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World

Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World PDF Author: Christine Zabel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000364070
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
This volume historicizes the use of the notion of self-interest that at least since Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith’s theories is considered a central component of economic theory. Having in the twentieth century become one of the key-features of rational choice models, and thus is seen as an idealized trait of human behavior, self-interest has, despite Albert O. Hirschman’s pivotal analysis of self-interest, only marginally been historicized. A historicization(s) of self-interest, however, offers new insights into the concept by asking why, when, for what reason and in which contexts the notion was discussed or referred to, how it was employed by contemporaries, and how the different usages developed and changed over time. This helps us to appreciate the various transformations in the perception of the notion, and also to explore how and in what ways different people at different times and in different regions reflected on or realized the act of considering what was in their best interest. The volume focuses on those different usages, knowledges, and practices concerned with self-interest in the modern Atlantic World from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, by using different approaches, including political and economic theory, actuarial science, anthropology, or the history of emotions. Offering a new perspective on a key component of Western capitalism, this is the ideal resource for researches and scholars of intellectual, political and economic history in the modern Atlantic World.

Spatial Formats under the Global Condition

Spatial Formats under the Global Condition PDF Author: Matthias Middell
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110643006
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
Contributions to this volume summarize and discuss the theoretical foundations of the Collaborative Research Centre at Leipzig University which address the relationship between processes of (re-)spatialization on the one hand and the establishment and characteristics of spatial formats on the other hand. Under the global condition spatial formats are products of collective negotiations on the most effective and widely acceptable balance between the claim for sovereignty and the need for interconnectedness.