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Merchants, Companies, and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era (review)
- Journal of Interdisciplinary History
- The MIT Press
- Volume 31, Number 2, Autumn 2000
- pp. 318-319
- Review
- Additional Information
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.2 (2000) 318-319
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Review
Merchants, Companies and Trade:
Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era
Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era. Edited by Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 330 pp. $69.95
Merchants, Companies and Trade is divided into four parts with a different number of chapters in each part: Asia especially India, c. 1500; routes, markets, and merchants; European presence in Asia; and, finally, a discussion of the implications of trade between Asia and Europe. The overarching purpose of the book is to refocus the study of the Asian trade during the early modern period from a Eurocentric view to one that tries to understand the state of Asian trade at the point when serious European involvement began to determine how long it took for that involvement to become domination.
Although the book is subtitled "Europe and Asia," the actual area of interest is Indian trade and its connections west to the Red Sea and east into the South China Sea. In this regard, Part II is particularly interesting. This section is made up of four papers that examine a number of different merchant networks at the beginning of the period, for example, the overland trade west to Isfahan or the role played by Armenian merchants. The same theme is revisited in the last chapter of the compilation. In "The Asian Merchants and Companies in Bengal's Export Trade, circa Mid-eighteenth Century," Chaudhury restates that until the actual physical and military domination by the British in the late eighteenth century, European trade was only a small part of intra-Asian trade as a whole--an important point stressed by the editors in their introduction. For too long, we have seen the European presence in Indian trade as the dominant force, instead of an adjunct to an intricate and extensive network that ran overland and by sea across the whole Eurasian continent.
Part III ostensibly changes perspective to the European presence in Asia. Chapters comment on the Portuguese and the Dutch East Indian Companies, the French India Company, the Swedish East India Company, and the Austrian Asian Company in an interesting attempt to bring [End Page 318] together Asia and Europe through the role played by individual companies. However, the volume does not provide the same information about each of these companies. In fact, not all of the papers examine company presence in India; they merely detail what is known about those companies. The question that is not really addressed is whether the Austrian, Swedish, or French presence had a fundamental impact on the trade in India or, indeed, in their home countries. What seems a glaring omission in this section, given the purpose of the book and the role eventually played by this company, is a chapter on the English East India Company.
Good as it is, the book has a number of shortcomings. Differences in style and interpretation exist in any volume, but this book shows no evidence of a strong attempt to generate coherence. Because the volume is disjointed in this sense, the editors' discussion of each chapter in the introduction becomes a useful guide. Most serious for the intended purposes of this book is the lack of any guide to the location of the towns, regions, and trade routes described. Non-specialists will have to find their own maps. This book is designed to change some of the entrenched historiography, but this omission diminishes its value for the general audience.
Ann M. Carlos
University of Colorado
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