Pim de Zwart examines the Dutch East India Company s intercontinental trade and its effects on living standards in various regions on the edges of the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Contrary to conventional views, De Zwart finds significant evidence of the integration...

The oceanic explorations of the 1490s led to countless material innovations worldwide and caused profound ruptures. Beverly Lemire explores the rise of key commodities across the globe, and charts how cosmopolitan consumption emerged as the most distinctive feature of material life after 1500 as...

Early globalization, rising cosmopolitanism and a new world of goods -- Fabric and furs: a new framework of global consumption -- Dressing world peoples: regulation and cosmopolitan desire -- Smuggling, wrecking and scavenging: or, the informal pathways to consumption -- Tobacco and the politics...