The Trouble with Tea: The Politics of Consumption in the Eighteenth-Century Global Economy by Jane T. Merritt

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-208
Author(s):  
Markman Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Global Economy

scholarly journals Capitalism, Christianity, and Slavery: Jesuits in New Spain, 1572–1767

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
John Tutino
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
New Spain ◽  
Sugar Plantations

Abstract The Jesuits arrived in New Spain in the 1570s and soon became participants in a dynamic world of silver capitalism at the center of the early modern global economy. They launched money-making enterprises to sustain their missions, churches, and schools (colegios) that relied upon enslaved African producers alongside indigenous workers in complex labor arrangements. The diversity of labor at the Jesuit-run Santa Lucía and Xochimancas estates contrast with the heavier reliance on enslaved African labor at Jesuit sugar plantations in Brazil. The article analyzes a key eighteenth-century Jesuit text, the Instrucciones a los hermanos jesuitas administradores de haciendas, to show how the Jesuits in New Spain conceived of their management of enslaved people and negotiated the contradictions between the spiritual and secular challenges of the boom era of silver capitalism.

Fractured Domesticity in the Old Regime: Families and Global Goods in Eighteenth-Century France

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (4) ◽  
pp. 1267-1277
Author(s):  
Julie Hardwick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
Uneven Terrain ◽  
Sharp Focus ◽  
Local Newspaper ◽  
The World ◽  
Household Members

Abstract The fractured nature of emergent domesticity in its first phase in the 1760s was inextricably tied to the perils as well as promises of commerce for individual households in an unpredictable global economy, although historians have focused on the metropolitan roots of domesticity. A microhistorical exploration of the world of a single household in the French city of Lyon brings the fault lines of a globalizing economy, consumption, and domesticity into sharp focus as lived experience. It suggests the uneven terrain of domesticity, in terms of gender, household, and family, as well as for producers and consumers. In the experiences of household members and in the classified advertisements in the local newspaper, fractured domesticity was manifest, the conjugal labor—reproductive and productive—that made global domesticity local was evident, and the centrality of commercial risk as a fault line in domesticity was clarified. The power and limits of “domesticity” as an emotional, cultural, and economic as well as political project were located in familial practice. The potency and limits of domesticity functioned as a system of power that was contingent, layered, and fragmented and that highlighted and elided emotional, reproductive, and productive costs in particular ways at particular times.

scholarly journals THE ‘GREAT DIVERGENCE’ IN BENGAL- AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE EARLY MODERN COTTON TEXTILE INDUSTRY

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arkaprabha Pal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Cotton Textile ◽  
Cotton Production ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Great Divergence ◽  
Market Driven

Bengal was one of the leading producers of high-quality textile during the early modern centuries and played a very nodal role in the intra-Asian and global trade. After 1500, with the descending of the European traders on its shores, the cotton textile industry boomed. It accounted for nearly two-fifths of all textile exports to Europe from Asia. I attempt, in this essay, to understand the ‘Global Divergence’ debate in South Asia with a focus on Bengal and its trade and production in cotton textiles. I situate Bengal as a central region of cotton production and trade in the early modern global economy with regards to not only Europe but also to other parts of Asia and within the sub-continent itself. I reiterate Prasannan Parthasarathi’s contribution to the ‘Great Divergence’ debate to argue that Bengal hosted a thriving cotton textile industry deep into the late eighteenth century. I echo that the destruction of the textile industry occurred in the high days of colonialism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. I attempt to substantiate this by trying to understand Om Prakash’s analysis of the methods of procurement of production before and after the ascendency of the Europeans as political administratorsin Bengal; when production by weavers was market driven and when it was driven by coercion and impunity, respectively. I finally conclude by commenting on the limitation of this analysis and the further research scope it holds.

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