Mercantile Community Research Articles

ADAM SMITH ON THE “WRETCHED SPIRIT OF MONOPOLY” IN THE EAST INDIES TRADE

According to Adam Smith, the “wretched spirit of monopoly” dogged the East Indies trade. The regulations that governed the East Indies trade established legal barriers or restrictions to entry and sustained a mercantile community whose interests were “the opposite to that of the great body of the people” (WN IV, ch. iii, p. 494). The East Indies charter conferred a special privilege that shielded the English East India Company from all domestic competition in Asian trade. The East India Company was the complete incarnation of a mercantile system against which Smith had determined to launch “a very violent attack” in Wealth of Nations (Smith 1987, p. 251). Smith’s mistrust of trading bodies like the East India Company was compounded by its having assumed political powers commensurate with the sovereign while still in possession of its monopolistic franchise. Smith’s proposal was, first, to abolish the monopolistic franchise to rid society of “the unfortunate effects of all the regulations of the mercantile system” (WN IV, ch. vii, p. 606), and, second, to reform the East India Company’s administrative duties and functions in the Indian territories. The contention of this paper is that Smith’s call to abolish the East Indies monopoly was inseparable from his appeal for reform of the English East India Company.

Economic warfare goes global: the incorporation of the Indies in the great reprisal against the French, 1635–1640

ABSTRACT This article examines the Indies’ significant role in Spain’s economic warfare during Philip IV’s reign. It challenges the perception of the American territories as peripheral participants, emphasizing their central involvement in the General Reprisal against the French during the Franco-Spanish War. The study reveals interconnected policies between the Indies and European territories, the adaptations of the reprisal scheme to suit the American settings, and the consideration of each territory’s unique conditions. It also highlights the importance of the French mercantile community in Seville, their integration into the Atlantic trade, and their strategies to recover property in the American territories. Additionally, the article analyzes the introduction of rogation days in the Indies as a complementary measure, serving as a propaganda tool to otherize the French, influence public opinion, and shape perceptions of foreignness. Overall, the research enhances our understanding of Spain’s economic warfare strategies and their global impact.

Passive Cooling Methods Adapted for Thermal Comfort in Havelies of Bikaner

In recent years, significant global concerns revolve around issues like climate change, pollution, resource depletion. The increasing temperature on Earth, primarily driven by human activities releases greenhouse gases (about 49.5 gigatons of CO2 per year) into the atmosphere, that has a wide range of impacts on both the environment and society. The Earth's ability to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) is diminishing, leading to the depletion of the global ecosystem. The planet is undergoing warming, primarily driven by the construction industry, which has seen substantial increases in building materials, techniques, and energy demands. Nevertheless, traditional architecture has a history of practicing climate-responsive design. This research study centers on Bikaner, often referred to as the "City of 1000 Havelis" and is home to various business communities including Daga, Rampuriya, Kothari, and others. Havelies of Bikaner, which have been a source of pride for the Indian mercantile community, i.e. Marwaris, since the 16th century are influenced by social, cultural, climatic, and artistic factors. The planning, material selection, passive features of Haveli protects the inhabitants from the harsh impact of hot and dry climate of city. The narrow streets, thick walls, Aala gila work on wall & floor, courtyard, jharokha controls the indoor thermal balance. It is important to utilize traditional knowledge and integrate it with modern technology for holistic development.

War, peace and commerce and the Treaty of London (1604)

Abstract The Treaty of London (1604) brought an end to the long Anglo-Spanish War. Scholars have assumed that peace was broadly welcomed, especially among the English mercantile community. Yet many merchants had made vast fortunes from the war, through privateering or opening trade routes with Spain’s imperial territories. This article demonstrates that the lobbying of merchants significantly shaped the negotiations for the Treaty of London. Simultaneously, multiple manuscript treatises arguing pro or contra peace were widely circulated: these foregrounded commercial concerns in their analysis of foreign policy.

Documenting a maritime mercantile community through surface survey: Porto Rafti Bay in the post-collapse Aegean

Survey around Porto Rafti Bay in Greece reveals evidence of a prosperous community that exploited near-shore islets for habitation and craft production following the Late Bronze Age collapse. Surface assemblages provide insights into the strategies undertaken by this mercantile maritime group aptly navigating a dynamic socioeconomic environment.

The making of Atlas Maritimus (1728): A shift towards commercial geography

Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis (1728) is a vast conspectus of the coasts, ports and harbours around the globe, containing a section on sailing directions and over fifty engraved charts. It was first conceived as a means of promoting a new map projection system, for which a group of undertakers (cartographers, booksellers, engravers and a mathematician) obtained a patent in 1721. The enterprise was supported by Edmond Halley, who wrote a short preface to the volume. The charts were available for public view by 1724, but before the volume appeared a change of plan became visible. Over half of the pages are now devoted to a comprehensive account of the geography of international commerce. This article gives the first full account of the evolution of the progress and of a shift in its intended readership. The book was now heavily targeted at the mercantile community as well as the nautical profession. The sources include printed books and pamphlets, newspaper advertisements, and official documents. An age of increasing global commerce demanded a new kind of atlas, which served less as a general gazetteer of individual nations and more as as a guide to world trade.

‘Guru Rinpoche is Śivajī’: Ethnicity and ethnic boundary drift in Nepal’s ethnic art

This paper argues that ethnic paintings connotate situational ethnicity, adjusted by social change and ethnic boundaries. Based on anthropological fieldwork focusing on painter and mercantile communities, social-political connotations of ethnic art are discussed by applying an analysis of social semiotics in three discourses, employing the case of post-1990 Nepal. In particular: 1) Modern visual expressions of ethnicity are adopted into anti-hierarchical representations, as people engage in ethnic politics and cultural activities. 2) The two genres of ethnic painting, paubhā, and thangka, which were developed by traditional creators and informed by ethnicity, have experienced and developed a cross-boundary mode of operating in industries in response to social change. 3) In the market and mass media, the narrative of value construction regarding the tradition of ethnic art reveals a sign arena that identifies a drift toward the nation, the state, and civilization, prepensely attempting to mobilize semiotic resources through the lens of politics, the market, and global values.

Epistemic Network: The Jesuits and Tropical Cyclone Prediction, 1860–1900

Jesuit scientists played a key role in the establishment of the earliest warning systems for tropical cyclones in the 1870s and 1880s. Jesuit observatories and their cyclone prediction methods were unrivaled in the geopolitically and commercially competitive landscape in the Antilles and the Far East. Even Western governments and local mercantile communities in Cuba, China, and the Philippines entrusted the Jesuits with the direction of national and regional weather services in the 1880s and 1890s, while state observatories and imperial navies often surreptitiously drew on the Jesuits’ forecasts for their own storm warnings. The ability of the Society of Jesus to produce, codify, and disseminate scientific knowledge is here addressed in terms of the formation of an “epistemic network” of actors sharing certain beliefs as well as a common scientific enterprise. This actor-centered network did not mean, however, that there was some center of calculation or production through which Western domination of knowledge over the periphery would take place. Quite the contrary, the case of Jesuit cyclone prediction details a specific networked activity that deepens our understanding of how specific epistemic networks can be actively engaged in the processes of circulation and globalization while also adapting, modifying, and producing prediction methods in local contexts.

Literary and religious history from the middle: Merchants and bhakti in early modern North India

This article examines the hagiographical writings of two religious communities, that is, the Dadu Panth and the Niranjani Sampraday, in what is now known as Rajasthan, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to illuminate how their monastic and lay members, particularly merchants and ‘scribal’ communities, imagined their religious, social and political worlds. The role of merchant and scribal groups in the origin and development of such so-called ‘nirguṇ sant’ bhakti movements has been largely overlooked, the assumption being that these movements drew their following primarily from members of subaltern communities. Yet a close reading of these hagiographical sources reveals that merchants and scribes played a central role in shaping the theological and literary character of these movements, and in turn these movements reorganised the social and financial relationships within these mercantile communities. By focusing on such ‘middle’ groups—that is, groups that mediated intellectual, literary and economic exchanges between different spaces and institutions such as the monastery, the court and the bazaar—historians, as well as scholars of literature and religion, can gain insight into how merchant and scribal groups helped to re-form notions of the individual, community and polity in early modern North India.

Catholics during the English Revolution, 1642–1660: Politics, Sequestration and Loyalty. By Eilish Gregory

In Catholics during the English Revolution, Eilish Gregory successfully tackles the complex and constantly evolving topic of sequestration during one of the most fractious periods of early modern England. In a continuation of the work of Michael Questier, Alexandra Walsham, and Gabriel Glickman, and finally addressing the mid-seventeenth century, the book shows Catholics as more than passive recipients of Protestant fears. Through underscoring their agency in responding to sequestration, Gregory presents Catholics not as isolated, but rather as fully immersed with and embedded in seventeenth-century English social, political, and religious life. In doing so, the book also highlights the multifaceted expressions of both Catholic and Protestant identities. The book begins by addressing the initial structure of sequestration and compounding and its early expansion from a short-term means to bring in revenue to a core method of maintaining cash influx. This chapter also explores the role played by the mercantile community, particularly Goldsmith Hall. The book continues, chronicling the continual changes made to the sequestration process and the Republic’s centralization of it to better target specific enemies of the Commonwealth. Gregory shows how this constant attempt at improvement revealed sequestration, like many other early modern laws, to be “an imperfect and defective fiscal mechanism” (p. 68). Chapter 3 shifts to look at how the public used print to remain informed of the changes to or strategies for sequestration. Printed ordinances, parliamentary debates, newsbooks, and critiques of the system are addressed, including a close reading of John Austin’s Christian Moderator series. At times, the boom in print, especially newspapers, in the 1650 s feels glossed over. However, it is a testament to how well-grounded the context is throughout the rest of the book.

Layers of Meaning and Evolution of Cultural Identity: The Case of Wind Towers in Dubai

Place identity is an important constituent of general cultural identity, in that it provides its share of continuity, sustainability, and character to the built environment. The image of cultural heritage is stored knowledge that reflects the identity of a specific culture. In the formation of a place, some features gain identity with the environment. This study aims to explore the evolving image formation of wind towers in Dubai, and how this image is related to the concept of meaning and cultural identity of the place. This study focuses on the process of place identity formation and its relation to the evolving cultural values of society, as well as how it is applied to the changing meaning of cultural heritage objects. Based on the value assessment approach, different examples of wind towers, taken from either traditional houses or contemporary buildings influenced by the local architecture in Dubai, the author attempted to study how the interpretation and meaning of wind towers has evolved through time, thus influencing the cultural identity of Dubai city. This study is based on qualitative research. It concludes that a wind tower, as a cooling device, represents a unique example of an evolving creative process of architectural expression, resulting from the social and cultural complexity of the Persian Gulf in the early twentieth century. They were introduced through commercial exchange, adapted by the mercantile community, and integrated into local cultural systems—thus creating new architectural features and urban character—and reintroduced as a modern symbol of cultural identity for Dubai and the UAE.

Political Economy in the Baltic Borderlands: Commercial Interests and the Anglo‑Russian Treaty of Commerce, 1766

Commercial treaties between states played a crucial role in shaping overseas trade and the mercantile communities that lived among in the Baltic borderland. This article takes as its example the Anglo‑Russian treaty of commerce of 1766 between Britain and Russia to explore how Britain in particular negotiated commercial treaties. It shows the crucial role of commercial expertise, and particularly the British Russia Company, in shaping the treaty to best serve British interests. Britain’s reliance on commercial interests for expertise, meanwhile, was crucial to maintaining its supply of naval stores. The article then explores the impact of the treaty on mercantile networks in the Baltic, arguing that the fluidity of citizenship and national affiliation allowed the merchants of the former Hanseatic towns in particular to adapt and benefit from commercial treaties between states, a process that merits further research. The intersection of state and commercial interests was fundamental to commerce in the Baltic borderlands.

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies

The Re-globalization Process in the Indian Ocean: the Ibadi Press in Zanzibar (al-Sultaniyya)

During the XIX century, on the Zanzibar Island, a gradual process of osmosis occurred through the first publications that often linked magical practices with the precepts of the Quran, resulting in a social and political interpretation of the Omani power on the Eastern African island that reflected a multiplicity of cultural roots. The vast network of international trade links, and the presence of numerous mercantile communities were progressively consolidated, stretching from Africa, Arabia, the Gulf, and India as far as Southeast Asia, Indonesia and even China with Zanzibar as a polarizing new capital and centre. Modernity brought by the international presences in Zanzibar involved numerous complex reflections in order not to losing the traditional society values and the main Ibadi precepts inside the new-coming progresses. Ibadi press on Zanzibar Island was in fact representing one of these social and political objects: re-globalizing the ancient communication flows between Oman and East Africa.

David Parish, Alexander Baring and the US Loan of 1813: The Role of Nationality and Patriotism in the Transatlantic Mercantile Community in Times of War

The War of 1812 was a very expensive conflict for the United States. In 1813, three foreign-born investors, among them David Parish from Hamburg, Germany, saved the US government from bankruptcy by providing a sixteen-million dollar loan. This article focuses on the reasons why Parish – who strongly opposed the war – agreed to take a major share in the loan. At the same time, it examines the ways in which the Hamburg merchant tried to sell a large share of his US government bonds in Great Britain – America’s wartime enemy. Parish’s actions make it obvious that he promoted the idea of a supranational mercantile community that was not bound by patriotic considerations even during war times. Consequently, it was the British merchant banker Alexander Baring who stood at the core of Parish’s plans to sell US bonds in London. By contrasting Baring’s room for manoeuvre during these financial transactions with that of Parish this article shows that in the British context public expectations of loyalty and patriotism could indeed limit the abilities of local merchants in financing the opponent of war. Thus, the comparison of Parish’s and Baring’s experiences highlights the importance of local factors such as a consolidated public opinion and a strong nation state in setting the limits of the sphere of activity for internationally operating merchants in times of war.

The Enigma of the Hyksos, Volume 1: ASOR Conference Boston 2017—ICAANE Conference Munich 2018—Collected Papers

The Enigma of the Hyksos, Volume 1: ASOR Conference Boston 2017—ICAANE Conference Munich 2018—Collected Papers

The Evolution of Digital Trade from the North American Trade Agreement to the United States Mexico Canada Agreement

The Evolution of Digital Trade from the North American Trade Agreement to the United States Mexico Canada Agreement

Spatial and communication practices of Chettiar women in their ancestral homes

The Chettiars are a mercantile community in Tamil Nadu who built large palatial houses called the Valavu Veedu (ancestral homes). Applying Lefebvre’s theory of space, this study documents spatial and communication practices of Chettiar women belonging to three different generations from three families and how their use of space in their ancestral homes have changed with time. From the data collected through direct observation, in-depth interviews and auto-ethnography, it was found that women who live(d) in the ancestral home are able to relate to spatial norms within the domestic space whereas the younger generations women experience alienation. While Chettiar women suffered from curtailed interpersonal communication, limited access to media, and access to knowledge within the ancestral space, their rights within the domestic space have drastically improved due to change in spatial practices, which include enhanced socialization and exposure to other cultures afforded by modern houses in cities. Appropriation of space occurs when changes in social space affect the perceived space, conceived space, and lived space. When these families lived in modern houses in other towns and cities, the design and architecture affected the lived experience and spatial practices. This change has helped women in appropriating space in the ancestral home.

Tracking the growth of government securities investing in early modern England and Wales

Interest in the growth of tradeable securities in early modern Britain, especially its relationship to economic development and the funding of government debt, has centered mainly on the borrower – whether it be trading company, industrial enterprise, or the state. This article directs attention to the investor, using Charity Commission Reports for England and Wales that document a dramatic mid-eighteenth-century shift by donors and trustees from investments in real estate and rent charges to perpetual government annuities, mainly 3 percent Consols. The heavy investment in this public debt product is what ultimately prompted the creation of the London Stock Exchange in 1801.In analyzing this shift, which occurred among the propertied in all regions of the nation, not just the metropolis or among corporate entities and the mercantile community, I consider both what made the annuities increasingly attractive for charitable trusts and the alternatives – real estate and private loans secured by mortgage or other means – more problematic. Legal changes, I argue, played a role in the transformation, especially the Charitable Uses Act of 1736, which made charitable devises of real estate very difficult and probably resulted in reduced investment in human capital and less wealth redistribution. Regions varied, however, in the degree to which they switched from real estate in the latter part of the eighteenth century; they also differed in the extent to which the switch resulted in more gifts of interest-bearing loans as well.Admittedly, the changes documented in this article concern only one type of depository for assets, charitable trusts. The appeal of these annuities, however, could extend to investments needed for other purposes such as postmortem payments to dependents. Moreover, the fall-off in demand for real estate in trusts correlates with GDP estimates showing a steady decline in income from real assets after 1755 and what some have noted in this period as a puzzle – the lack of an increased rate of return on rents and private loans at a time of robust investment in government debt. Most importantly, though, the transition demonstrates the ability of the government to induce a broad spectrum of the propertied population to invest in securities, if the vehicle they offered had the right characteristics, which were not necessarily highest yield or liquidity without loss in value.

A Reformist, a Diplomat, and a Benevolent Merchant: Hājī Mīrzā Sayyīd Muhammad-Taqī Shīrāzī (Afnān), the Shīrāzī Trading House and the Propagation of the Babi-Baha⁠ʾi Faith

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to offer a glimpse into the Baha⁠ʾi mercantile community in Iran during the second half of the nineteenth century and its reformist and modernist attitudes through the accounts of one of its leading merchants, Hājī Mīrzā Sayyīd Muhammad-Taqī Shīrāzī (Afnān).