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

Description

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.

Kristian Kristiansen is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg. He is the author of Europe Before History (Cambridge, 1998), Social Transformations in Archaeology (with Michael Rowlands,1998) and The Rise of Bronze Age Society (with Thomas B. Larsson, Cambridge, 2005), which was awarded best scholarly book in 2007 by the Society of American Archaeology. He received the Prehistoric Society's Europa Prize in 2013, and the British Academy's Graham Clark Medal in 2016. Thomas Lindkvist is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Gothenburg. He has written on a number of aspects of medieval society, including agrarian, political, and economic history, in Scandinavia. Janken Myrdal has been Professor of Agrarian History at the Swedish University of Agricultural sciences, and is now affiliated with the department of Economic History at the University of Stockholm. He has written on medieval cultural history and agrarian history in general.