Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900 [Paperback]

This vibrant collected volume considers the question: how, exactly, did the relationship between trade and religion develop historically? Examining a wide range of commercial exchanges across religious boundaries around the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the second millennium, it offers a variety of perspectives on this intriguing and surprisingly neglected subject.Although trade connects distant people and regions, bringing cultures closer together through the exchange of material goods and ideas, it has not always led to unity and harmony. From the era of the Crusades to the dawn of colonialism, exploitation and violence characterized many trading ventures, which required vessels and convoys to overcome tremendous technological obstacles and merchants to grapple with strange customs and manners in a foreign environment. Yet despite all odds, experienced traders and licensed brokers, as well as ordinary people, travelers, pilgrims, missionaries, and interlopers across the globe, concocted ways of bartering, securing credit, and establishing relationships with people who did not speak their language, wore different garb, and worshipped other gods.Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900focuses on trade across religious boundaries around the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans during the second millennium. Written by an international team of scholars, the essays in this volume examine a wide range of commercial exchanges, from first encounters between strangers from different continents to everyday transactions between merchants who lived in the same city yet belonged to diverse groups. In order to broach the intriguing yet surprisingly neglected subject of how the relationship between trade and religion developed historically, the authors consider a number of interrelated questions: When and where was religion invoked explicitly as part of commercial policies? How did religious nol“*