You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro's operations from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-NAFTA world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out. Evolving technology accelerated the flow of matter and energy moving through the extractive systems of exhausted mines and revived profitab...
Using cutting-edge theory regarding trade networks and diaspora, this book offers an innovative analysis of Sephardic merchants in 17th c. Amsterdam’s trade. Challenging views that Sephardic success stemmed from endogamous business relationships, it shows that Sephardic merchants traded with non-Sephardim.
Drawing on a rich trove of documents, including correspondence not seen for 300 years, this study explores the emergence and growth of a remarkable global trade network operated by Armenian silk merchants from a small outpost in the Persian Empire. Based in New Julfa, Isfahan, in what is now Iran, these merchants operated a network of commercial settlements that stretched from London and Amsterdam to Manila and Acapulco. The New Julfan Armenians were the only Eurasian community that was able to operate simultaneously and successfully in all the major empires of the early modern world—both land-based Asian empires and the emerging sea-borne empires—astonishingly without the benefits of an...
This book offers 32 texts and case studies from across a wide range of business sectors around a managerial framework for Sustainable Business. The case studies are developed for and tested in executive education programmes at leading business schools. The book is based on the premise that the key for managing the sustainable business is finding the right balance over time between managing competitiveness and profitability AND managing the context of the business with its political, social and ecological risks and opportunities. In that way, a sustainable business is highly responsive to the demands and challenges from both markets and societies and managers embrace the complexity, ambivalen...
Fruitfully combining approaches from economic history and the cultural history of commerce, this book examines the role of interpersonal trust in underpinning trade, amid the challenges and uncertainties of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. It focuses on the nature of mercantile activity in two parts of Spain: Cadiz in the south, and its trade with Spain's American empire; and Bilbao in the north, and its trade with western and northern Europe. In particular, it explores the processes of trade, trading networks and communications, seeking to understand merchant behaviour, especially the choices made by individuals when conducting business - and specifically with whom they chose to deal. Drawing from a broad range of Spanish, Peruvian and British archival sources, the book reveals merchants' experiences of trusting their agents and correspondents, and shows how different factors, from distance to legal frameworks and ethnicity, affected their ability to rely on their contacts. Xabier Lamikiz is Associate Professor of Economic History at the University of the Basque Country. .
Noted historian of the Lusophone world Malyn Newitt offers an expansive account of how exploration, imperialism and migration shaped the Portuguese and their global diaspora.
The Holy Office of the Inquisition (a royal tribunal that addressed issues of heresy and offenses to morality) was established in Peru in 1570 and operated there until 1820. In this book, Ana E. Schaposchnik provides a deeply researched history of the Inquisition’s Lima Tribunal, focusing in particular on the cases of persons put under trial for crypto-Judaism in Lima during the 1600s. Delving deeply into the records of the Lima Tribunal, Schaposchnik brings to light the experiences and perspectives of the prisoners in the cells and torture chambers, as well as the regulations and institutional procedures of the inquisitors. She looks closely at how the lives of the accused—and in some c...
Empires Between Islam and Christianity, 1500–1800 uses the innovative approach of "connected histories" to address a series of questions regarding the early modern world in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. The period between 1500 and 1800 was one of intense inter-imperial competition involving the Iberians, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the British, and other actors. Rather than understand these imperial entities separately, Sanjay Subrahmanyam reads their archives and texts together to show unexpected connections and refractions. He further proposes, in this set of closely argued studies, that these empires often borrowed from each other, or built their projects with knowledge of other competing visions of empire. The emphasis on connections is also crucial for an understanding of how a variety of genres of imperial and global history writing developed in the early modern world. The book moves creatively between political, economic, intellectual, and cultural themes to suggest a fresh geographical conception for the epoch.
In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, the eighteen essays in this volume provide a fresh and much-needed perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. This collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood...
Germán Vergara explains how, when, and why fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) became the basis of Mexican society.