ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with early modern markets and the institutions and conventions necessary for them to function. It examines the role of transportation improvements in linking up distant markets and intensifying trade. The chapter focuses on drugs such as coffee, tobacco, and opium, their contributions to stimulating long-distance trade, and their effects on those who produced and consumed them. It looks at a wide variety of goods that became commodities, moving across both physical space and mental categories in the process: from the commonplace potato and corn to the coveted gold, silver, and silk; from mundane but useful industrial raw materials such as rubber to the bizarre ones such as the cochineal bug. The chapter discusses the role of violence in capital accumulation and market formation. It considers features of the modern world economy such as standardization of money, measures, and time; the creation of trade conventions; and corporations. The chapter also discusses episodes of industrialization and—to a lesser degree—deindustrialization.
