Trade and Civilisation

Economic Networks and Cultural Ties, from Prehistory to the Early Modern Era

Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas Lindkvist, Janken Myrdal

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781108425414
• eBook ISBN: 9781108636292
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides the first global analysis of the relationship between trade and civilisation from the beginning of civilisation 3000 BC until the modern era 1600 AD. Encompassing the various networks including the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean trade, Near Eastern family traders of the Bronze Age, and the Medieval Hanseatic League, it examines the role of the individual merchant, the products of trade, the role of the state, and the technical conditions for land and sea transport that created diverging systems of trade and in the development of global trade networks. Trade networks, however, were not durable. The book focuses on the establishment and decline of great trading network systems, and how they related to the expansion of civilisation, and to different forms of social and economic exploitation. Case studies focus on local conditions as well as global networks until the sixteenth century when the whole globe was connected by trade.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• One Theorizing Trade and Civilization
• Two Cloth and Currency: On the Ritual-Economics of Eurasian Textile...
• Three Prices and Values: Origins and Early History in the Near East
• Four The Rise of Bronze Age Peripheries and the Expansion of International Trade 1950–1100 BC
• Five Interlocking Commercial Networks and the Infrastructure of Trade in Western Asia during the Bronze Age
• Six Mycenaean Glocalism: Greek Political Economies and International Trade
• Seven Deconstructing Civilisation: A ‘Neolithic’ Alternative
• Eight Marginalizing Civilization: The Phoenician Redefinition of Power circa 1300–800 BC
• Nine The Birth of a Single Afro-Eurasian World-System (Second Century BC–Sixth Century CE)
• Ten On the Silk Road: Trade in the Tarim?
• Eleven Trade, Traders, and Trading Systems: Macromodeling of Trade, Commerce, and...
• Twelve Trade and Civilization in Medieval East Africa: Socioeconomic Networks
• Thirteen Conflictive Trade, Values, and Power Relations in Maritime Trading Polities of the...
• Fourteen The Hanseatic League as an Economic and Social Phenomenon...
• Fifteen Elliot Smith Reborn? A View of Prehistoric Globalization From...
• Sixteen Trade-Light: The Political Economy of Polynesian and Andean Civilizations
• Seventeen Long-Distance Exchange and Ritual Technologies of Power in the Pre-Hispanic Andes
• Eighteen Empire, Civilization, and Trade: The Roman Experience in World History
• Nineteen World Trade in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries
• Twenty Postscript: Getting the Goods for Civilization
• Index