Böcker i Global Economic History-serien

Cloth has always been the most global of all traded commodities. It is an illuminating example of the circulation of goods, skills, knowledge and capital across wide geographic spaces. South Asia has been central to the making of these global exchanges over time. This volume presents innovative research that explores the dynamic ways in which diverse textile production and trade regions generated the first globalization . A series of experts connect this global commodity with the dramatic political and economic transformations that characterised the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Collectively, the essays transform our understanding of the contribution of South Asian cloth to the making of the modern world economy.

This study presents detailed information on the book production per century and on the uses of medieval manuscripts in eleven areas of the Latin West. Based on a sample from an extensive library and on additional information the numbers of manuscripts surviving from the period 500 1500 have been assessed statistically. Other data have been used to quantify the loss rates of such books in the Latin West. Combining both sets of data allowed the estimation of the medieval production rates of manuscripts. Book production during the Middle Ages can be seen as a century-average indicator of local economic output. With a number of explanatory variables (monasteries, universities) the medieval book production in the Latin West can be adequately explained.

Settler Economies in World History is a comparative, wide-ranging historical study of the experience of the modern settler societies that have followed a distinctive economic and institutional path to the present from their neo-European origins.

Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy investigates, through regional studies and paired comparisons, how technological skills and knowledge were reproduced and disseminated in the advanced agrarian societies of China, India, Russia and Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

Drawing on new research on textile trade and production in the regions that depended on the Indian Ocean, the book contributes to a new understanding of the role that Indian cloth played in the making of the modern world economy.

In Globalization and the Colonial Origins of the Great Divergence the intercontinental trade of the Dutch East India Company and its effects on living standards in a number of its colonies are analysed to shed light on several major debates in economic history.