Religion and Trade

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.

Francesca Trivellato is the Frederick W. Hilles Professor of History at Yale University. She is the author of The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period and Fondamenta dei vetrai: Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento.
Leor Halevi is Associate Professor of History and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society, a book that won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award and the Middle East Studies Association's Albert Hourani Award, as well as book prizes given by the Medieval Academy of America and the American Academy of Religion.
Cátia Antunes is Associate Professor of Early Modern Economic and Social History at Leiden University.

Introduction, Francesca Trivellato
1. Religion and Cross-Cultural Trade: A Framework for Interdisciplinary Inquiry, Leor Halevi
2. The Blessings of Exchange in the Making of the Early English Atlantic, David Harris Sacks
3. Trading with the Muslim World: Religious Limits and Proscriptions in the Portuguese Empire (c. 1480-1570), Giuseppe Marcocci
4. The Economy of Ransoming in the Mediterranean: A Form of Cross-Cultural Trade between Europe and the Maghreb (Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century), Wolfgang Kaiser and Guillaume Calafat
5. Reflections on Reciprocity: A Late Medieval Islamic Perspective on Christian-Muslim Commitment to Captive Exchange, Kathryn A. Miller
6. Cross-Cultural Business Cooperation in the Dutch Trading World, 1580-1776: A View from the Amsterdam Notarial Contracts, Cátia Antunes
7. Trade across Religious and Confessional Boundaries in Early Modern France, Silvia Marzagalli
8. Coins and Commerce: Monetization and Cross-Cultural Collaboration in the Western Indian Ocean (Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries), Roxani Eleni Margariti
9. Crossing the Great Water: The Hajj and Commerce from Pre-Modern Southeast Asia, Eric Tagliacozzo
10. African Meanings and European-African Discourse: Iconography and Semantics in Seventeenth-Century Salt Cellars from Serra Leoa, Peter Mark