The “decline” of the central Asian caravan trade

T he central Asian caravan trade linking Europe, the Middle East, and China, which had developed as early as the Han dynasty (206 b.c. – a.d. 220), began to decline during Sung (960–1279) times and truly collapsed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It flourished during the Han and T'ang (618–907) dynasties, but the turbulence in northwest China during the Sung period disrupted trade along the so-called Silk Roads. In the Mongol era (midthirteenth to midfourteenth centuries), trade across Eurasia witnessed a resurgence that continued through the first century or so of Ming (1368–1644) rule. By the late Ming, however, the long-distance trade between China and the Middle East and Europe had dwindled to a trickle. Decline of this central Asian caravan trade has often been attributed to competition from the European oceangoing vessels that began to reach China in the sixteenth century. This new trade conveyed bulkier items, was less costly, and was freer of harassment and plunder. Such economic advantages, it has been asserted, enabled the sea trade to supersede the overland commerce, resulting ultimately in the collapse of the traditional caravan trade. This paper proposes, however, that though rising costs and competition from the oceangoing trade undermined land commerce across Eurasia, the political disruptions and the religious and social changes of the time must also be considered. These transformations were as critical as the economic pressures challenging merchants who were intent on maintaining the caravan trade.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine sixteenth century Netherlands business organisation and accounting practices, then the most advanced in Western Europe, to test Sombart's theory that scientific double entry bookkeeping was an essential prerequisite for the development of modern capitalism and the emergence of the public corporation during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than being a development of Paciolian bookkeeping, double‐entry bookkeeping in sixteenth century Netherlands was grounded in northern German (Hanseatic) business practices.Design/methodology/approachSixteenth century Dutch business records and Dutch and German bookkeeping texts are used to establish that north German Hanseatic commercial practices exercised the greatest influence on The Netherlands' bookkeeping practices immediately prior to the development of the capitalistic commercial enterprise in the first years of the seventeenth century.FindingsContrary to Sombart's thesis, scientific double‐entry bookkeeping was rarely used in sixteenth century Netherlands, which became Europe's most sophisticated commercial region during the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. Instead, extant commercial archives and the numerous sixteenth century accounting texts suggest that Hanseatic business practices and agents' (factors') bookkeeping were the dominant influence on northern Netherlands' business practices at this time. The organisation and administrative practices of Netherlands' businesses prior to the seventeenth century, especially their decentralised structure and lack of a common capital, were founded on Hanseatic practices that were considerably different to the best Italian practice of the time.Research limitations/implicationsNorth German influences on Dutch accounting and business practices have significant implications for social theories of the development of capitalism, notably that of Bryer, that assume the use of a scientific (capitalistic) form of double‐entry bookkeeping was essential to the development of capitalism from the seventeenth century. This is tested in a subsequent paper which examines the accounting practices of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost‐Indische Compagnie or VOC) which was founded in 1602 at the very cusp of modern capitalism. The research presented here was partially constrained by the scarcity of transcriptions of original sixteenth century bookkeeping records.Originality/valueThe vigorous debate in the accounting history literature about the dependence of modern capitalism upon a scientific (capitalistic) form of double entry bookkeeping prompted by Sombart has been mainly concerned with England. This paper introduces into the debate material which documents the accounting and business practices of the most commercially advanced region of Europe in the late sixteenth century and the influence of Dutch bookkeeping texts.

The economic role of Jews in Christian Europe changed profoundly from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Sephardic Jews—the descendents of those who had been expelled from the territories of the crown of Castile and Aragon in 1492, or of those who, after seeking refuge in Portugal, were forced to convert to Catholicism in 1497—formed increasingly stable communities in Venice, Livorno, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London (after 1656). They were eventually tolerated in Bordeaux and other towns in southwestern France, and slowly set foot in the Dutch and English Caribbean. In the late seventeenth century, they also established small enclaves in Levantine and North African ports. Unlike medieval Jewry or other early modern segments of Jewish society in Europe, Sephardic merchants did not engage in petty credit and retail sale. Instead, many among them were largely involved—each with varying degrees of success—in long-distance trade, international finance, and the processing and manufacturing of colonial goods (especially sugar, tobacco, and diamonds). For most Sephardim, credit operations were closely linked to commerce, but for a few, such as Gabriel de Silva (ca. 1683–1763) in Bordeaux, private banking was their sole occupation.1

The erection of Christian sacred shrines and places of worship is a historically complex phenomenon. It goes back to the very early beginning of Christianity. These concrete manifestations despite substantial differences due to time and place share common elements. As an object of research it cannot, of course, be isolated from its cultural context. Especially in early modern times the revival or erection and installation of a place of worship and devotion was always a product of various factors: intellectual activity, topographic and administrative organization, and pastoral, theological, and often political endeavors.1 This essay tries to outline aspects of this phenomenon vis-a-vis an important shrine neglected by international research: the Grotto of St. Paul at Rabat in Malta, the center of the Pauline cult in the island. Since it can be claimed that there has been cultural continuity in the Christian Mediterranean from the period of late Antiquity, the time of the Fathers of the Church, up to the beginning of the nineteenth century (with the possible exception of the Arab period), where does the sacred Pauline shrine in Malta fit in this picture? I Traveling to visit Christian cult centers is a phenomenon known since the fourth and fifth century when Christianity finally established itself as the dominant religion in the Mediterranean. Those self-imposed exiles, those peregrinations and often dangerous voyages were undertaken for the sake of purification of the soul and spiritual salvation. In many cases also material ends and the desire to break away from the dependence on the ruling class mattered. Places of miracles, martyrdom, death, and resurrection and burial sites of holy men and women of Christianity caused Jerusalem, Rome,2 and Santiago de Compostela3 to become the most important pilgrimage centers of the Christians. This pilgrim traveling continued into the early medieval period and grew considerably in extent in high and late medieval times.4 However, during the time of the Reformation, especially in the third and fourth decades of the sixteenth century, pilgrimages fell into disrepute in Protestant countries although they retained their popularity in the Roman Catholic countries of southern Europe, in spite of the attacks by Luther, Melanchthon, and Erasmus. Nevertheless, the Roman Catholic Church was becoming highly aware that the people were not rallying behind a mere theological formula any more. As an answer, they made efforts to renovate and re-establish concrete objects of veneration and cult. The initial revival of places of devotion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was far from random but part of a carefully planned program of Catholic policy. Although it had existed before the specific revival in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the movement of the Pauline cult in the Mediterranean island of Malta had a direct connection with the Counter-Reformation program of the Catholic Church, with its roots in the Council of Trent. Architecture, art, and literature had to state the 'grandeur' and importance of the Catholic Church in order to attest the truth of the Faith. Art had to visualize this spiritual program and helped to develop a baroque style which was now highly visual. A most significant part of this ecclesiastical program was the revival of the holy traditions of the pilgrimages and their aims by rebuilding or extending old monuments in a baroque style, thereby practically creating new ones. However, not in every case of the revival or new installation of centers of Christian devotion in the late sixteenth century or the beginning of the seventeenth century can the main and only motive be traced back to the concept of the Counter-Reformation. This paper tries to single out the special case of the increase of the Pauline devotion in the sixteenth century in the island of Malta. The example presented by the shrines of St. Paul in Malta and the Grotta di S. …

This article discusses developments among Jurchen tribes on Chosŏn Korea’s northeast frontier during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By the sixteenth century, it is often argued, Chosŏn court officialdom had thoroughly internalized Sinocentric ideology, and this caused them to despise Jurchens as barbarian outsiders. By exploring court debates and poetry related to Jurchen uprisings in northern Hamgyŏng, however, this essay argues that Sinocentric ideology was only one factor in sixteenth-century Chosŏn views of the Jurchens. The long-established relationship of certain Jurchen groups with the Chosŏn court and the important role that Jurchens played in Chosŏn’s defense also influenced Chosŏn attitudes. Even Sinocentric ideology, whereby Jurchens were considered inferior barbarian outsiders, could be used rhetorically to call Chosŏn officials to treat their Jurchen inferiors with paternalistic concern.

This book examines the satirical poetry of Edmund Spenser and argues for his importance as a model and influence for younger poets writing satires in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The book focuses on reading satirical texts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in relation to one another, with specific attention to the role that Edmund Spenser plays in that literary subsystem. The book connects key Spenserian texts in The Shepheardes Calender and the Complaints volume with poems by a range of authors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including Joseph Hall, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton, and George Wither to advance the thesis that Spenser was seen by his contemporaries as highly relevant to satire in Elizabethan England. For scholars of satire, the book offers a fuller discussion and theorization of the type of satire that Spenser wrote, “indirect satire,” than has been provided elsewhere. A theory of indirect satire benefits not just Spenser studies, but satire studies as well. For scholars of English Renaissance satire in particular, who have tended to focus on the formal verse satires of the 1590s to the exclusion of attention to more indirect forms such as Spenser’s, this book is a corrective, an invitation to recognize the importance of a style of satire that has received little attention.

Performing the Sea: Fortune, Risk, and Audience Engagement in<i>Pericles</i>

To date, most scholarly studies of Sino-Korean relations during the Ming have focused on the turbulent events of the late fourteenth century and the periods of crises during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Less attention has been devoted to the maintenance of Ming-Chosôn relations and the resolution of relatively minor incidents during the intervening two centuries. More attention to the ongoing management of Sino-Korean relations during this period of peace and general amity is necessary. Not only was the period of the fifteenth and the majority of the sixteenth centuries more typical of Ming-Chosôn relations than the heightened tension and suspicion that marked the early fourteenth and late sixteenth centuries. Further, close study of these ongoing relations reveal much about how East Asian diplomacy was actually conducted.

The study presents the history of the emergence, development and decline of the frontline towns concentrated in the area of the Hirskyi Tikych River. The research focuses on Buzivka, Buky, Vorone, Zelenyi Rih, Zubrykha, Okhmativ, Sokolivka and Monastyryshche. Natural factors and the branching of the Black Way determined the concentration of settlements in the river area. The study of the frontline towns is relevant due to the peculiarities of urban processes in Central Ukraine and is important for the development of historical and architectural reference plans. The research aims to determine the spatial features of the city centre in the cities of the right-bank Ukraine frontier in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the course of the study, the methods of analysis (for literary sources), comparative analysis (for the cartography of different times), and a set of field studies were used. The studied towns had an optimal defensive perimeter dominated by a Ukrainian wooden church, and a key element of the spatial image was a residential wooden house. It is determined that the cities of the frontier had political and cultural conflicts with the centre of the state, which caused the loss of the role of settlements and the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late seventeenth century. Based on historical cartography, source material, and the preserved ancient street network, the urban planning features of the town centres are localised and identified. The frontier towns concentrated in the area of the Gorny Tikich River were economically and culturally united and were characterised by rational planning. Improvements in the town centres of the frontier towns are linked to the political and economic intentions of magnates in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The spatial layout of the town centre was centred around a Ukrainian wooden church, except Monastyryshche, which also had a wooden church in the town centre. The main building element was the Ukrainian wooden house, which defined the spatial and cultural image of the settlement. Due to the uncertain political boundaries and the division of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late seventeenth century, the frontier towns lost their significance. In the nineteenth century, except for Monastyryshche, all settlements declined economically and administratively. The practical value of the study lies in the fact that the results can be used in the development of historical and architectural reference plans, revitalisation projects for the centres of historic towns, downtown regeneration projects, and the commemoration of lost important monuments. The research materials can be used in a course on the history of urban planning and architecture of Ukraine, as well as in the development of tourist and recreational routes

THE relationship of Indian Islam to that of the Islamic heartlands can be studied historically in terms of the actual impacts from the Middle East and vice versa. So far as Islamic thought in the subcontinent is concerned, its major source up to the seventeenth century lay in the north-Iran and Central Asia.2 The main religious disciplines cultivated in this period are law and mysticism. Beginning with the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, this picture becomes modified. With the opening of the direct sea route to Arabia, certain Indian scholars began visiting the Hijaz for the purpose of study. As a result of this orientation, the characteristic orthodox Arabo-Islamic science of Hadith was introduced and propagated in India, its monumental champion in the seventeenth century being Shaikh CAbd al-HIaqq of Delhi, called Muhaddith, or traditionist par excellence. This development coincides with a vigorous reassertion of Islamic orthodoxy and a bid for the recovery of a purist Islam from the compromises to which Islam had been subjected in India through the growth of certain popular forms of Sufism as mass religion. In the present paper, we shall not be concerned too much with the external historical relationship of Indian Islam with the Arab Middle East, but with the efforts of the Indian Muslims, in the realm of thought, to respond to the challenges and tensions created by the existence of Islam in a Hindu majority India. Hence, in the process we are dealing with, Islamization and orthodoxification become identical. As will become apparent presently, the terms of the resolution of this challenge are set within India and the emergent product is an Indian Islam, but with a definite reference to and with a source of inspiration from the outside at two levels: the ethos of Islam as it was shaped by the Prophet and the Qur'dn and the theologians of the early centuries, and the consciousness that Muslims in India are a part of the World Muslim Community with the Middle East as its natural center, as it were. The leadership of the Muslim Community in India was first shocked into an acute awareness of the precarious situation of Islam in India by the religious attitude and policies of Akbar. The Bhakti Movement,3 which was essentially a massive mechanism to revivify Hinduism against the threat of Islam by minimizing the rigors of the caste system, and of the purely ritual aspects of the Brahmanic religion, and heavily stressing

Rosicrucianism, Lutheran Orthodoxy, and the Rejection of Paracelsianism in Early Seventeenth-Century Denmark Jole Shackelford (bio) There are many faces to the chemical philosophy that is associated with the German reformer Theophrastus Paracelsus: his ideas penetrated radical theology, internal medicine, surgery, mineralogy, pharmacology, and even political philosophy—inasmuch as Paracelsianism helped shape religious dissent in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Various aspects of this historical process have been examined in the large literature on Paracelsus and the Paracelsians, and on the Rosicrucian movement. Even so, the dynamics of the reception and rejection of Paracelsian ideas (as distinct from chemical drugs), and the effect that Paracelsian philosophy has had on early modern scientific writers, require further exploration and documentation. Specific instances—microhistorical studies—are needed in order to sustain or challenge the larger patterns that emerge. These studies need to be temporally and geographically diverse and contextually sensitive. The purpose of the present study is to examine the reception of Paracelsian natural philosophy in a specific setting—Copenhagen in the [End Page 181] late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—and to illuminate the changing intellectual and religious context that ultimately made that doctrine publicly untenable. In particular, I will argue that the growing orthodoxy of the Lutheran church in Denmark created an environment in which Paracelsian ideas were a liability. Meanwhile, Paracelsian doctrines were being put forth in the literature of religious dissent that laid the foundations for the later development of radical Pietism. 1 One subset of this literature comprises the treatises and correspondence associated with the Rosicrucian calls for reform in the second decade of the seventeenth century. Other scholars have undertaken to link the “Rosicrucian furor” with Paracelsianism, and to connect both with the political and religious upheavals antecedent to the Thirty Years’ War. 2 The present study offers clear evidence of these connections by first establishing that an interest in Paracelsianism existed in Denmark; that it was explicitly rejected by one of Copenhagen’s leading academicians, Ole Worm (1588–1654), whose views are a fair indication of general academic sentiment; and that it was rejected because of its intimate connections to Rosicrucianism. Finally, this narrative is placed in the religious and political context of Counter-Reformation Denmark, and specific historical explanations for the rather abrupt change in attitude toward Paracelsianism are offered, with special attention given to Andreas Libavius’s criticism of Paracelsian and Rosicrucian doctrine. Ole Worm and the Medical Professors at Copenhagen Although Denmark is often regarded as a small country, out of the intellectual mainstream, in the early seventeenth century it was a chief player in the northern European politics of power. The continental dominions under the control of Christian IV—comprising what is today southern Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Schleswig-Holstein—lay adjacent to the Holy Roman Empire and controlled all traffic into the Baltic Sea. At the cultural and political center of this kingdom lay Copenhagen. The mid-seventeenth-century blossoming of the Scientific Revolution in Copenhagen produced scientists of international repute and enduring importance to the history of science—men such as Christian Sørensen [End Page 182] Longomontanus, Thomas Bartholin, Simon Pauli, Niels Stensen (Steno), Ole Rømer, and Ole Borch. The observational prowess, the synthesis of facts, and the generation of new scientific theories that have given these men enduring fame are credited in part to the development of a Danish empiricism at Copenhagen, an attitude toward methodology similar to that which in England was called Baconian. Ole Worm, professor of medicine and collector of natural oddities, has come to symbolize this no-nonsense skeptical empiricism—in part because he was central to the academic developments until his death in 1654, as a prominent member of the medical patriarchy that then ruled medicine, and in part because of the volumes of correspondence he has left to posterity. He was at one time or another in contact with every Danish figure of academic importance in the second quarter of the seventeenth century and he served as a clearinghouse for new ideas, information about books, and news of academic positions coming available. 3 Yet if we examine the early interests of this champion of diffidence, we find him intent on...

Reason of state has been a central concept of political and international thought since it emerged in the late sixteenth century. Often associated with Realpolitik and assumed to be little more than an instrumental, immoral, and ruthless pursuit of power, reason of state remains a surprisingly underexamined concept in the study of international relations. This chapter offers an intellectual history of reason of state beginning with its origins in Renaissance Italy before moving on to discuss its development in the context of religious strife during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was in this context that Giovanni Botero wrote The Reason of State (1589), revising the language of political analysis and expanding the knowledge on which government and statecraft depend. The literature spawned by the concept of reason of state helped to legitimize the idea that states operated according to distinctive political and moral rules, even if debate persisted between secularizing thinkers and those intent on reconciling statecraft with religious doctrines. Natural law thinkers in the seventeenth century such as Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf helped consolidate the idea of the modern state as an impersonal entity possessing its own legitimate form of political morality.

Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

abstract: In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English conquest narratives set in the Americas and popular entertainments increasingly represented a unified Britain through the figure of a “repeating England”: an insular refuge in an inchoate ocean of dangers that linked the work of English homemakers to colonial settlers. This article charts that development in two parts. It begins in the late sixteenth century, when conquest writers like George Peckham and John Hutchinson were exchanging the geographic insularity of earlier English self-representation for a model that viewed Englishness not as genealogical or place-based, but as archipelagic and mobile, maintained in and across English homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Englishness here is not a geographic context but a blueprint for producing and possessing an English place through the labors of English “planters.” Jacobean entertainments by Thomas Dekker and John Middleton then drew on this earlier conquest writing to stage Britishness through perspectival techniques that unified subjects in radically different viewing positions and made Britishness a matter of perspective. By following these repeating Englands from page to stage and from Ireland to the Americas, this analysis shows how English writers created a unified Britain from colonial materials and represented Britishness as an extension of settler identity.

Scholars of the madrigal have often emphasized Torquato Tasso’s role in the emergence of a serious musical manner that differed sharply from the widespread canzonetta style of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This emphasis is grounded in Tasso’s endorsement of musical gravitas in the dialogue La Cavaletta from the mid-1580s, as well as in some settings of Gerusalemme liberata, the musical style of which matched the heroic tone of the poetry. Tasso, however, produced many poems that were suitable to lighter musical styles. In particular, he wrote several short strophic compositions of light tone, that is, canzonetta poems. Numerous composers set these as such or as canzonetta madrigals, the hybrid genre that became popular in the late sixteenth century. This poetic-musical repertoire counters Tasso’s and scholars’ emphasis on gravitas and prompts a reconsideration of his impact on music that takes into greater account his substantial contribution to lighter genres.