Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks and Empire Building

This collection takes a multi-perspective approach in the study of empire and commodities beyond temporal and spatial boundaries. From early modern Venetian trade to tea in the Eurasian world, the role of gold in Portuguese imperial ambitions and British sailors as traders, Across Colonial Lines uses commodity networks as a lens to study empire and the links between them.

Offering a comparative understanding of the movement of commodities across the British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Venetian empires, it demonstrates the impact of commodity production, consumption and movement on colonial and post-colonial societies. It further explores the nexus between the local and the global to consider the role played by individual producers, petty traders, sailors and the consumer in creating regional circulations and a wider global political economy. Re-examining ‘commodities’ and highlighting the interwoven character of multiple commodity networks to explain both the trade and fiscal aspects of imperialism alongside its ideology, governance and knowledge production, each chapter takes an individual commodity to illuminate the history of commodity transmission within trans-imperial contexts. They show how these networks shaped traditions of knowledge production, social organisation, political control and even impetus to globalisation from as early as the 13th century.