In narrating his circumnavigation of the world at the turn of the seventeenth century, the Florentine Francesco Carletti became the first European merchant to leave an account of travel on existing commercial routes. A repentant ex-slave trader and smuggler turned dealer in Chinese goods, Carletti travelled “at the edge of empires,” providing a unique perspective on the promise and peril of a connected globe. With his long stays in Lima, Mexico City, Manila, Nagasaki, Macao, and Goa, as well as travels across the Americas, the Pacific, and Asia, Carletti documents a changing world in which European powers and traders interacted and often clashed with other empires and polities. Trading at the Edge of Empires brings together 24 scholars to situate and unpack how Carletti’s travels illuminate our understanding of trade, slavery, empire, religion, language, ethnography, cartography, cosmography, and material culture in the early modern world.
