Great Trade Walls in Imperial China and Spain: Global Goods, Power Struggles and Bankruptcy, 1644-1840

This book offers a comparative and polycentric approach to the formation of global trade networks and goods that circumnavigated China, America, and Europe in the so-called process of ＂early globalization＂ during the early modern period.

Based on a pioneering archival strategy developed by GECEM Project (Global Encounters between China and Europe www.gecem.eu) and funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the chapters in this volume deploy innovative methodology built on the process of clustering new empirical evidence on geostrategic locations to analyse complex socioeconomic systems. Each chapter in this volume focuses on a specific case study that validate the usefulness of this methodology for a more accurate analysis of the self-regulating institutions, social networks, circulation of global goods and information, and smuggling activities that characterised the nonlinear markets of early modern China, Europe, and the Americas. These studies constitute a clear example of the new directions of global (economic) history and how a bottom-up approach through new data mining and comparative method helps to unveil big research questions. The designing of GECEM Project Database (www.gecemdatabase.eu) stands out as cutting-edge Digital Humanities tool used in this book.

This book is an insightful resource for scholars of Global History and Atlantic studies, including those interested in China’s trade and history, and its global encounters with the West. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Atlantic Studies: Global Currents.

Manuel Perez-Garcia is tenured Associate Professor at the Department of History (School of Humanities) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China). He is Distinguished Researcher at the University Pablo de Olavide (Seville, Spain) and P.I. of GECEM Project funded by the ERC (European Research Council) Starting-Grant, ref. 679371, under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, www.gecem.eu, and is founder and director of the Global History Network in China (GHN). He is author of Global History with Chinese Characteristics Autocratic States along the Silk Road in the Decline of the Spanish and Qing Empires 1680-1796 (2021), Blood, Land and Power. The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility and Lineages in the Early Modern Period (2021), and Vicarious Consumers: Trans-National Meetings between the West and East in the Mediterranean World (1730-1808) (2013).