Across Colonial Lines

Devyani Gupta is Associate Professor at Jindal Global University, India, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University of Leeds, UK. She has held fellowships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and Volkswagen Stiftung, and has taught at the Universities of Delhi, India, California, USA, and Leeds, UK. Purba Hossain is Economic History Society Tawney Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research London, UK, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, UK. She received her PhD from Leeds University, UK, and is a recipient of the Royal Historical Society Marshall Fellowship.

Like the other books in the Empire's Other Histories series, this volume offers new perspectives on imperial and colonial histories. It does this by focusing on the ways in which commodities create and shape empires. Across Colonial Lines features an exciting group of scholars, whose work crosses multiple boundaries: chronological, spatial, linguistic, cultural, to name a few. The two editors have done an outstanding job shepherding these wide-ranging studies into such a coherent volume.

• List of IllustrationsList of ContributorsCommodities, Networks and Empire Building: An Introduction, Devyani Gupta (O. P. Jindal Global University, India) and Purba Hossain (University of Cambridge, UK)1. From Commodity Trade to ‘Virtual’ Empire: Venice in the Twelfth to Fifteenth Centuries, Andrew Blackler (University of Birmingham, UK)2. West Africa, the Akan Gold Trade and Portugal’s Global Ambitions in the Sixteenth Century, Edmond Smith (University of Manchester, UK)3. Tea and Empire in the Asian Interior, c. 1750–1900, Jagjeet Lally (University College London, UK)4. Sailors as Traders: Early Modern Seafarers in Commodity Chains, Commercial Practices and Empire, Richard J. Blakemore (University of Reading, UK)5. The Social Locations of Colonial Knowledge: Indigo in Bengal, Java and Senegal, Willem van Schendel (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)6. What Angolans Got for their Coffee: Connecting Histories of Labour and Consumption in Colonial Africa, c. 1860–1960, Jelmer Vos (University of Glasgow, UK)7. ‘Docile, quiet, orderly’: Indian Indenture Trade and the Ideal Labourer, Purba Hossain (University of Cambridge, UK)8. Globalization Gothic: Unpacking the Commodity Fetish in Caribbean Tourism, Lowell Woodcock (Sussex Centre for World Environmental History, UK)Conclusion: The Chains of Empire: Some Thoughts on Commodity History as Method, Erika Rappaport (University of California Santa Barbara, USA)BibliographyIndex