"Hans Holbein's Triumphs (1532-1534), commissioned for the headquarters of the Hanseatic League in London and Kano Naizen's The Portuguese namban ('foreigners') painted in Japan in 1543 are representations of worlds of trade, where wealth, speculation, exploitation, poverty, curiosity,...

This volume undertakes the important task of envisioning a regional history of Asia based on its unique internal characteristics, going beyond the usual West/non-West dichotomy. The “regional trade zone of modern Asia” was debated in the 1980s. Since then, Japanese historians of the...

"This book showcases the wide variety of commercial cosmopolitan practices that arose from the global economic entanglements of the early modern period. In so doing, it demonstrates robust alternatives to the universalising western imperial model of the later period. Deploying a number of...