Besides mercantile, shipping, legal, insurance and financial services, the capital’s maritime connections extended to large-scale manufacturing like shipbuilding, ship repairing, marine engineering, sail-making and sugar baking. Shipping investors, almost exclusively involved in some aspect of sea trade, varied from those holding a few shares to the relative few reliant on ship owning for their income. The wealthiest shipowners and merchants, as well as the Royal Navy, were among the customers of London’s shipyards, clustered along the waterfront. Subject to severed cyclical swings, shipbuilding was a highly skilled, unionised occupation. Many of those employed in port industries lived in London’s then quite socially mixed waterfront parishes of East London. Seamen ashore in colonial and foreign trades also gathered here in response to a sailor economy serving their need for credit, lodging and entertainment.

This chapter addresses the rapid increase in the consumption of white wines in the 1950s. It traces some of the changes to the efforts of the wine companies to develop the consumer market through brand building. But the breakthrough came with the perfection of the method of cool fermentation that permitted the preservation of the aromatic character of white wines. Boosted by innovations in the cellar, in the form of temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks, it became possible to produce wine of a reliable quality on an industrial scale. The chapter argues that while the KWV criticised the merchants, they worked with selected farmers to improve the quality of the wine. This was true of Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery (SFW) and Distillers. The greater costs involved, however, led many farmers to resort to selling their grapes to the cooperatives rather than making their own wine. The chapter focuses on specifc farms like Rustenberg where it is possible to precisely date the turn to cool femerntation The importance of brand development is underlined through an account of the meteoric wise of SFW’s Lieberstein, which was reputedly the world’s largest brand in the early 1960s.

The first substantive chapter addresses the structural problem facing wine farmers at the Cape. Much like in France, there was a serious problem of overproduction of wines of indifferent quality leading to unstable prices. The chapter details the struggle between wine merchants and farmers, which led to the constitution of the Koöperatieve Wynbouwers Vereniging van Suid-Afrika (KWV) in 1918. It shows how the KWV successfully lobbied the Smuts government for devolved regulatory powers that enabled it to control the pricing for distilling wines from 1924. At the same time, the chapter shows that the market was constrained by low consumption amongst whites, including the Afrikaner wine farming community itself. This was compounded by the efforts of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and its allies in the South African Temperance Alliance (SATA) to pursue local option for whites and a form of temperance for the black population. The former failed, but the passage of the 1928 Liquor Act prevented the majority of the population from purchasing wine or brandy. Hence the victory of the KWV over the merchants was tempered by the legislative success of the temperance movement.

Following the Battle of Mohács in 1526 the kingdom of Hungary was divided into three parts: the north and west came under Habsburg rule, the east formed the new principality of Transylvania while the rest was occupied by the Ottomans. That division created a favourable environment for the spread of the Reformation. The new religious ideas had already spread quickly to Hungary after 1517 with merchants and students from the German-speaking communities of the royal free cities being among the first to adopt and disseminate them. Even the royal couple, King Louis II and Queen Mary of Habsburg, showed a receptiveness to the Reformation through their relationship with Prince George of Brandenburg. However, after Mohács 75 per cent of Hungary’s medieval parishes collapsed and different variants of Protestantism won wide support across all three areas into which the former kingdom was divided. Antitrinitarianism also gained many adherents in those parts of Hungary that were not subject to the Habsburgs. Between the Catholics, Protestants and Antitrinitarians, as well as the substantial Orthodox Christian communities in the region, and the Muslims in Ottoman areas, Hungary became remarkably multi-confessional. However, the Catholic Church retained enough support across all three areas to form the basis of a remarkable renewal under Habsburg auspices in the seventeenth century.

Taking a pause from direct focus on the Jhaveris, Chapter 4 is an interlude that outlines major shifts across the Mughal Empire between the 1680 and 1720s. I suggest that military campaigns in the Deccan region impinged the Mughal treasury and undermined administration to an extent never seen before. Officials in Gujarat started to engage in behavior that undermined Mughal sovereignty. Yet, they also had little choice as monetary resources were becoming scarce. Financial limitations impacted the quality of state machinery including the upkeep of buildings, delay in salary payments, and even the ability of officials to legitimately demand taxes. Despite this, local Gujarati poems suggest that residents preferred Mughal rule to ruthless attacks from the Maratha marauders, whose periodic raids were increasing in frequency and intensity. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, successive Mughal emperors were poorly equipped to revive the grandeur of their ancestors. Their short stints as emperors, sometimes as brief as a few months, led to the further breakdown of Mughal authority. This manifest most clearly in the form of rivalries between Mughal governors sent to control and profit from Gujarat. Insecure in their positions and strapped for cash, these governors turned to assaulting key members of the business fraternity in the city of Ahmedabad.

This chapter introduces the study, setting, argument, and plan of progression of Bankrolling Empire. In particular, I introduce the Jhaveri family of Ahmedabad and identify how the Mughal state provided new opportunities and challenges for the family by the early seventeenth century. The reader is left with the idea that traditional explanations of Mughal collapse such as bigotry of emperors, superior fighting power of rival warlords, and communal distrust between Muslim rulers and Hindu subjects are not adequate. Instead, I suggest financial crises were the chief cause that tipped Mughal administration beyond recovery. Such transformations in state and locality in Mughal Gujarat are highlighted by focusing on four generations of a remarkable business family, the Jhaveris of Ahmedabad, and their relations with political elites. The Jhaveris were deeply involved in political intrigue, courtly life, and the finances of Mughal officials and their rivals across two centuries.

Chapter 2 pursues a novel approach by combining the study of the local printing production and book imports to examine the different forms of market supply. It argues that the book trade was a rising though risky business. Mapping the workshops in Lima, it shows that print production was continuous and the output growing. However, even more reading material was imported into Peru, as proven by the quantitative evaluation of the number of boxes containing books, including the works of several representatives of the Catholic Enlightenment. Although most books had a licence, this chapter focuses on the illicit trade, in the form of titles in ships’ freight that were prohibited by the Inquisition and products from secret presses in Lima. The chapter lays bare the characteristics of a colonial book market fed by two totally differently structured supply sources that were both growing in late colonial times.

The development of Afro-Brazilian slave society and demography, the class of free persons and their occupations. The growth of port cities and São Paulo and the transitition from slave to free labor

An important feature of Iran’s political economy is the variety of opportunities it provides, through which individuals and groups can accrue economic benefits from and through the state. At the broadest level, the Iranian economy cannot be said to be in a healthy state. The Iranian economy is structurally unhealthy. But the economy’s maladies are products of, and also contributing factors to, means of personal enrichment for those with the right political connections. There are a number of areas to focus on, including the strong connections between the state and bazaari merchants; the perverse consequences of resource curses such as overreliance on oil and rampant corruption; the state’s efforts at various welfare schemes and the impulse toward statist economics; and the processes and consequences of pulling back from statism through privatization. All of these developments have combined to undermine the economy’s developmental potential. They have also coalesced to provide multiple means of patronage and clientelism in which the state plays a critical facilitating role. As such, Iran’s economy, diseased and underperforming as it is, provides important sources of support and resilience for the state.

The idea that the Song experienced an economic (or monetary, financial, commercial) “revolution” has gained broad currency in the historiography. One key development was the monetization of the economy, including the introduction of paper currency, used along with various kinds of metal currencies for all kinds of commercial transactions and even tax payments. The role of the state was crucial, both in providing infrastructure for transportation and distribution networks and in implementing policies that supported merchant entrepreneurs and promoted the development of agriculture through the introduction of new technologies and new crops. Farmers specialized in the production of certain commodities, and ceramics, textiles, and other goods were also produced for the marketplace. Both urban and rural markets proliferated, and new kinds of merchant enterprises accompanied this commercial growth. The expansion of shipbuilding and advances in both shipbuilding and navigational technology supported the growth of maritime trade. Commercial relations with Japan and Korea in particular also fostered cultural connections: the transmission of religion, books, and other cultural commodities went along with silks, foodstuffs, metals, and aromatics. Despite ongoing political and military conflicts between them, overland border trade continued between Song and its northern nomadic neighbors to supply essential and luxury goods.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

This chapter explores the insights that ethnography offers into understanding the interface between commerce and ethics. The first section argues that the anthropology of exchange, in which commerce is seen as a distinctive sphere of transaction, risks truncating our understanding of the relationship between commerce and ethics. The second section explores the relationships between trade, violence, and state power, noting that merchants often articulate ethical ideals as they negotiate these relationships. The third section discusses scholarship on long-distance trading networks and trust, and suggests that the category of ethics is most helpful when it is used to describe not the basis of trust but the ways in which merchants manage and confront mistrust: for example, how they conceive of tensions between sentiment and self-interest. The final section identifies four areas stimulated by attention to the ethical dimensions of commerce: the diverse notions of reputation and personhood that animate the conduct of trade; the ways in which merchants conceive of the relationship between commerce and systems of morality and negotiate moral dilemmas; the way that commerce is informed by vernacular notions of value, abundance, and prosperity; and the forms of self-making that traders pursue through commerce.