ABSTRACT

This collective volume explores the ways merchants managed to connect different spaces all over the globe in the early modern period by organizing the movement of goods, capital, information and cultural objects between different commercial maritime systems in the Mediterranean and Atlantic basin.

Merchants and Trade Networks in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, 1550-1800 consists of four thematic blocs: theoretical considerations, the social composition of networks, connected spaces, networks between formal and informal exchange, as well as possible failures of ties. This edited volume features eleven contributions who deal with theoretical concepts such as social network analysis, globalization, social capital and trust. In addition, several chapters analyze the coexistence of mono-cultural and transnational networks, deal with network failure and shifting network geographies, and assess the impact of kinship for building up international networks between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. This work evaluates the use of specific network types for building up connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Basin stretching out to Central Europe, the Northern Sea and the Pacific.

This book is of interest to those who study history of economics and maritime economics, as well as historians and scholars from other disciplines working on maritime shipping, port studies, migration, foreign mercantile communities, trade policies and mercantilism.

chapter |36 pages

Connectors, networks and commercial systems

Approaches to the study of early modern maritime commercial history

part |70 pages

Merchant networks, early modern long-distance trade and globalisation

chapter |21 pages

Understanding networking

Theoretical framework and historical evidence

chapter |24 pages

Merchants and the beating of a butterfly's wings

From local to global in the transfer of economic behaviour models in the eighteenth century

part |62 pages

The social composition of networks

chapter |21 pages

Adaptive strategies

French and Flemish merchant communities in Seville as connectors of European and American markets (1570–1650)

chapter |15 pages

Agents of globalisation

An approximation to Santi Federighi's commercial network, c. 1620–1643

part |50 pages

Connecting spaces

chapter |25 pages

Interconnecting trade regions

International networks of German merchants in the eighteenth century

chapter |23 pages

Merchants between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean

The Bouligny family case (1700–1762) 1

part |36 pages

The complexity of networks

chapter |16 pages

Hides and the Hispanic monarchy

From contraband to royal privilege 1

chapter |18 pages

Structural holes and bad ideas

Liverpool's Atlantic trade networks in the early-eighteenth century 1