Drawing upon economic history, cultural studies, intellectual history and the history of science and medicine, this collection of case studies examines the transatlantic transfer and transformation of goods and ideas, with particular emphasis on their reception in Europe.

Drawing upon economic history, cultural studies, intellectual history and the history of science and medicine, this collection of case studies examines the transatlantic transfer and transformation of goods and ideas, with particular emphasis on their reception in Europe.

From the late-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, Spain was the most extensive empire the world had seen, stretching from Naples and the Netherlands to the Philippines. This provocative work of history attributes Spain's rise to power to the collaboration of international business interests, including Italian financiers, German technicians, and Dutch traders. At the height of its power, the Spanish Empire was a global enterprise in which non-Spaniards -- Portuguese, Basque, Aztec, Genoese, Chinese, Flemish, West African, Incan, and Neapolitan -- played an essential role. Challenging, persuasive, and unique in its thesis, Henry Kamen's Empire explores Spain's complex impact on world history with admirable clarity and intelligence.

Henry Kamen's work re-creates the dazzling world of Imperial Spain, from the capture of Moorish Granada and Columbus's first voyage in 1492, to its expansion into Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, ad the opening up of the frontiers in Texas and California in the eighteenth century. Drawing on the accounts of those who witnessed these great events, whether Aztec chroniclers, Italian explorers or Filipino sultans, Kamen balances the wonders of the Empire (the first sight of the Pacific, the astonishing voyages of the Manila galleons) with the horrors - the slavery, disease, terror and waste of human life it entailed.

"This book had its inception in a series of twelve lectures delivered in the spring of 1934 at the Instituto Hispano-Cubano of the University of Seville in Spain"--Foreword.

This open access book analyses Iberian expansion by using knowledge accumulated in recent years to test some of the most important theories regarding Europe’s economic development. Adopting a comparative perspective, it considers the impact of early globalization on Iberian and Western European institutions, social development and political economies. In spite of globalization’s minor importance from the commercial perspective before 1750, this book finds its impact decisive for institutional development, political economies, and processes of state-building in Iberia and Europe. The book engages current historiographies and revindicates the need to take the concept of composite monarchies as a point of departure in order to understand the period’s economic and social developments, analysing the institutions and societies resulting from contact with Iberian peoples in America and Asia. The outcome is a study that nuances and contests an excessively-negative yet prevalent image of the Iberian societies, explores the difficult relationship between empires and globalization and opens paths for comparisons to other imperial formations.

Following a study on the world flows of American products during early globalization, here the authors examine the reverse process. By analyzing the imperial political economy, the introduction, adaptation and rejection of new food products in America, as well as of other European, Asian and African goods, American Globalization, 1492–1850, addresses the history of consumerism and material culture in the New World, while also considering the perspective of the history of ecological globalization. This book shows how these changes triggered the formation of mixed imagined communities as well as of local and regional markets that gradually became part of a global economy. But it also highlights how these forces produced a multifaceted landscape full of contrasts and recognizes the plurality of the actors involved in cultural transfers, in which trade, persuasion and violence were entwined. The result is a model of the rise of consumerism that is very different from the ones normally used to understand the European cases, as well as a more nuanced vision of the effects of ecological imperialism, which was, moreover, the base for the development of unsustainable capitalism still present today in Latin America. Chapters 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, and 13 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com