Empires and Nations in the Modern World: Shifting Political Orders

This essay traces the path of empires and nations as forms of governance, the eventual predominance of nations and disappearance of empires, and the contemporary interplay of large and small nations as the dominant form of global governance. It also gives attention to the rise of capitalist economic organization as a factor expanding empires and later encouraging nationhood. The essay emphasizes two stages in the emergence of nations: the emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of nations and eventually of the great powers, and the post-1945 emergence of nations as the universal form of government, consisting mostly of small powers, linked by the United Nations.

Producing Gold and Silver to Globalize the Economy during the Early Modern Era: San Luis Potosi and the Pacific Trade with Asia

This article presents evidence from archival sources that allows us to reconstruct the commercial networks that permitted the continuous flow of silver and gold from northern New Spain to Asia during the early modern era. These networks obtained various consumer goods – fabrics, spices, porcelain – that were then introduced into Spanish American markets. The narrative follows the bullion through its journey from the production center in San Luis Potosi to the Pacific and Asia. This vantage point contributes to the construction of a polycentric view within the framework of global history by assessing the role played by the American and Asiatic possessions of the Hispanic Empire in the first globalization. Using a methodological framework provided by social network analysis, the article presents a study of two commercial networks based in New Spain and extending to the Philippines and Peru. The essay underlines the role merchants played in mobilizing precious metals to accelerate exchanges and generate extraordinary profit margins.

Bin Yang on the Global History of Cowries

Bin Yang correctly states that cowrie shells (250 species) and cowrie monies (two species mostly) deserve far more attention in global histories than they have received. He provides the most comprehensive view of the global history of cowries and cowrie monies to date. Multiple shell monies proliferated worldwide, but they did not concentrate within China (except Yunnan) nor within Europe. Why did specific cowries accumulate only in certain specific geographical locations? Yang establishes a general answer: cultural preferences for holding specific objects, including specific monies, determined where the shells were concentrated. He offers global evidence that, I argue, contradicts mainstream economic theory, which is based upon conceptual aggregation of diverse monies into amorphous stocks of (national or regional) money (singular). Yang demonstrates repeatedly that distinct market locations and distinct market prices existed for specific cowrie and other shell monies (plural) throughout global history. His evidence starkly demonstrates inadequacies of mainstream monetary theory (although he does not say as much). The relentless evidence of the existence of monetary disaggregation, evidence highlighted throughout Yang’s volume, demonstrates an urgent need for alternative monetary theories that portray prices and stocks of individual monies in conformity with empirical evidence provided by archival historians.

Chinese Silk and Globalization along the Hispanic American Road, from the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

This essay analyzes one of the main elements of the economic relationship between China and colonial Latin America: the Chinese Silk Road. The road demonstrated a bipolarity of early globalization, and its impact across the Pacific enhanced the material culture of Hispanic American society from Mexico to Buenos Aires. The route of circulation was largely informal, due to prohibitions imposed by metropolitan Spain designed to guarantee the growth of European economic connections across the Atlantic Ocean. Quality variations and affordable prices made Chinese silks among the most valuable articles in Latin American markets before the nineteenth century, when British-Indian cotton emerged as the main textile of the global era.

Toward a Global History of Young Israel

This article argues that the first two decades of Israeli state-building can be compared structurally to some main processes in postwar Western-European societies, and that this approach productively situates Israel within a global perspective, uncovering new relationships between the local and the global. In addition, it proposes a methodological reading of the young Israeli society before the Six-Day War and a theoretical framework in which to place it. It provides an analysis of this young society from the perspective of Western history, constituting a new reference point that does not strive to negate other common approaches. If, until now, the history of the first two decades of Israel has been examined from a local and particular point of view – whether the state-building process or political, social, and national controversies – I propose to view the Israel of the 1950s–1960s as a postwar society that underwent the same structural processes as other Western European societies during those years, despite domestic differences.