Abstract
Reviewed by: Mariana P. Candido, University of Notre Dame, USA
Contributions to this volume engage with Philip Curtin’s classic study Cross-Cultural Trade in World History, stressing the role of religion in long-distance trade. Two strong theoretical introductory chapters are followed by empirical case studies that cover early modern England, France, Holland and Portugal, as well as chapters that focus on broadly defined regions such as the early Mediterranean or Indian Ocean. The authors examine the role of legal institutions in preventing violence and protecting merchants who crossed political, religious and cultural boundaries. However, only one of the chapters (Peter Mark’s chapter on ivory carving in Sierra Leone) fully engages with the production and commercialization of material objects. Overall, the case studies indicate that profits were more important to merchants than religious or cultural differences.
Trivellato’s introduction presents an important overview of the literature on cross-cultural trade exchanges and the importance of intermediaries in the process. It stresses the importance of legal mechanisms to enforce and protect trade. In many ways, Trivellato historicizes globalization, showing how people interacted and exchanged objects and ideas in the past. Leor Halevi’s contribution examines how in the past and in recent times, Muslim theologians reflected on the nature of the commercial exchange between Muslims and Christians. Engaging with the studies of Max Weber, Clifford Geertz and Olivia Constable, among others, Halevi shows that Muslim religious leaders feared that commodities possessed religious identity and that Muslim merchants could unintentionally help the spread of Christianity, or at least the worship of other gods, through the buying and selling of objects associated with Christianity such as candles.
The following chapters explore commercial exchange at the time of European expansion. David Harris Sacks examines the commercial exchange between Europeans, mainly the English, and Native Americas in Newfoundland in the early seventeenth century. Giuseppe Marcocci stresses the role of Christianity propagation in the early phase of European expansion and colonialism. Furs acted as the object of desire in the first case, while Portuguese merchants looked for spices and gold. In both cases, trading with pagans or ‘heathens’ was justified as a conversion effort. Also focusing on the early modern period, Wolgang Kaiser and Guillaume Calafat (Chapter 5) and Kathryn A. Miller (Chapter 6) analyse the politics of war, enslavement and ransoming in the Mediterranean world. Religious orders, diplomats and a combination of actors interacted to guarantee a successful exchange of commodities or cash for captives, despite the lack of a common legal framework.
Moving away from the Mediterranean but maintaining the interreligious focus, Cátia Antunes examines financial cooperation among Sephardim Jews and Christians in the Dutch world. Antunes shows how personal loans and mortgages favoured financial links between Jews and Christians of different denominations, despite the fact that the members did not share religious or kinship affinities. In Chapter 7, Silvia Marzagalli delves into the commercial interaction between different religious groups within France, particularly Bordeaux, in the eighteenth century.
In the next chapters the focus of the volume shifts to the Indian Ocean. Roxani Eleni Margariti explores the role of coins in the trade networks connecting the Jewish and Muslim trade diasporas in different commercial centres such as Cairo, Aden and Indian cities in the Indian Ocean between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. The existence of multiple political entities and commercial institutions did not stop merchants from exchanging letters and goods, and even moving towards the monetization of their trade. Also focusing on the Indian Ocean world, Eric Tagliacozzo analyses the importance of the Hajj as a commercial enterprise since it required accumulation of resources and exchanges along the way. Tagliacozzo shows how colonialism facilitated the movement of colonial subjects, and not exclusively Muslim elites, to take part in the religious pilgrimage.
Peter Mark concludes the volume with an important study on the motivations and cross-cultural understandings that informed the carving of ivory saltcellars produced by the Sepes of West Africa at the turn of the seventeenth century. African artisans produced the objects for export to Portuguese merchants. Mark examines the skills involved in the production of carved ivory and the meanings ascribed to these objects by the agents involved, both artists and consumers. Mark argues that local artisans artistically expressed in the ivory saltcellars their ideas about commerce in goods such as textiles and weapons, as well as human captives.
This is an important addition to the growing literature on long-distance trade and interactions in the early modern world and deserves a wide audience. Its comprehensive coverage and rigour result in a highly recommended volume for specialists on European expansion and cross-cultural exchanges.