Author: Constantin Ardeleanu

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Kalliopi Vasilaki’s review of “Atlas de la navigation en France à la veille de la Révolution: Une effervescence portuaire” by Silvia Marzagalli

Book Review: Atlas de la navigation en France à la veille de la Révolution: Une effervescence portuaire by Silvia Marzagalli – Kalliopi Vasilaki, 2025

Based on several tens of thousands of historical records of ship departures and arrivals of all sizes, this book offers, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of the bustling activity along the French coastlines on the eve of the Revolution. Drawing on 90 previously unpublished maps and a rich collection of illustrations, it sheds new light on lesser-known aspects of navigation and challenges a number of commonly held assumptions.

As the pages unfold, the reader will discover the unique journey of a vessel, the extent of trade from a particular port or province, the flags under which this commerce was conducted, and the various types of navigation that defined maritime traffic in France at the end of a century marked by strong commercial growth in an increasingly interconnected world. From smuggling to fishing, from colonial and slave trade to salt expeditions, from voyages beyond the Cape of Good Hope to passenger transport in the Mediterranean, the text offers a clear and educational account of the extraordinary variety of activities that animated French ports, and of the wide diversity that characterized them—while also illustrating how the historian works, confronted with the gaps and uncertainties inherent in the sources.

Marzagalli Silvia – Atlas de la navigation en France à la veille de la Révolution

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Erica Heinsen-Roach’s review of “Merchants on the Mediterranean: Ottoman–Dutch Trade in the Eighteenth Century” by Despina Vlami

https://journals.sagepub.com/…/10.1177/08438714241307850

How easy and uncomplicated was it for an 18th-century, medium-sized, Ottoman trade company to expand its business in the West? Which kind of resources, in terms of knowledge, information, experience, contacts and capital, could guarantee its successful passage from the business environment of a precapitalist oriental market to that of a major commercial and financial center of western Europe?

Following the venture of the Ottoman Greek merchants Bartholo and Raphael Cardamici, who in the 1760s traded goods between Smyrna, Constantinople and Amsterdam, Despina Vlami investigates various aspects of the organization and strategy necessary for such an important transition. To expand their wholesale trade business to Amsterdam, the Cardamicis chose as their local correspondent an experienced and strong-minded Dutch merchant, Thomas De Vogel. De Vogel’s letters addressed to his Ottoman clients reveal the course of their business transactions and the making of their personal relationship. At the same time, they are comprehensive and efficient tutorials on trade business and strategy guiding the Ottoman Greek merchants through the unpredictable and unfamiliar 18th-century international business universe.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/…/merchants-on-the…/

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Marta García Garralón’s review of “Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World” by Carrie L. Ruiz and Elena Rodríguez-Guridi, eds.

Book Review: Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World by Carrie L. Ruiz and Elena Rodríguez-Guridi, eds. – Marta García Garralón, 2025

Seafaring activity for trade and travel was dominant throughout the Spanish Empire, and in the worldview and imagination of its inhabitants, the specter of shipwreck loomed large. Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World probes this preoccupation by examining portrayals of nautical disasters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish literature and culture. The essays collected here showcase shipwreck’s symbolic deployment to question colonial expansion and transoceanic trade; to critique the Christian enterprise overseas; to signal the collapse of dominant social order; and to relay moral messages and represent socio-political debates. The contributors find examples in poetry, theater, narrative fiction, and other print artifacts, and approach the topic variously through the lens of historical, literary, and cultural studies. Ultimately demonstrating how shipwrecks both shaped and destabilized perceptions of the Spanish Empire worldwide, this analytically rich volume is the first in Hispanic studies to investigate the darker side of mercantile and imperial expansion through maritime disaster.

Shipwreck in the Early Modern Hispanic World – Bucknell University Press

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Anna Knutsson’s review of “Private Enterprise and the China Trade: Merchants and Markets in Europe, 1700–1750” by Meike von Brescius

Book Review: Private Enterprise and the China Trade: Merchants and Markets in Europe, 1700–1750 by Meike von Brescius – Anna Knutsson, 2025

The book is in open access.

This book examines the European commercial landscape of the early China trade, c.1700–1750. It looks at the foundational period of Sino-European commerce and explores a world of private enterprise beneath the surface of the official East India Company structures. Using rich private trade records, it analyses the making of pan-European markets, distribution networks and patterns of investment that together reveal a new geography of a trading system previously studied mostly at Canton. By considering the interloping activities of British-born merchants working for the smaller East India Companies, the book uncovers the commercial practices and cross-Company collaborations, both legal and illicit, that sustained the growth of the China trade: smuggling, wholesale trading, private commissions and the manipulation of Company auctions.

Private Enterprise and the China Trade – Merchants and Markets in Europe, 1700-1750 | Brill

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Bjørn-Petter Finstad’s review of “Eating the Ocean: Seafood and Consumer Culture in Canada” by Brian Payne

Book Review: Eating the Ocean: Seafood and Consumer Culture in Canada by Brian Payne – Bjørn-Petter Finstad, 2025

The failure of government-funded Canadian seafood marketing in the first half of the twentieth century.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Canadian fisheries regularly produced more fish than markets could absorb, driving down profits and wages. To address this, both industry and government sought to stimulate domestic consumption via increased advertising.

In Eating the Ocean Brian Payne explores how government-funded marketing called upon Canadian housewives to prepare more seafood meals to improve family health and aid an industry central to Canadian identity and heritage. The goal was first to make seafood a central element of a “wholesome” diet as a solution to a perceived nutritional crisis, and, second, to aid industry recovery and growth while decreasing Canadian fisheries’ dependency on foreign markets. But fishery managers and policymakers fundamentally miscalculated consumer demand, wrongly assuming that Canadians could and would eat more seafood. Fisheries continued to extract more fish than the environment and the market could sustain, and the collapse of the nation’s fisheries that we are now seeing has as much to do with failed assessments of market demand as it does with faulty extraction practices.

Using internal communications between industry leaders and Ottawa bureaucrats, as well as advertising and promotional material published in the nation’s leading magazines, national and local newspapers, and radio programming, Eating the Ocean traces the flawed understanding of not only supply but demand, a misguided gamble that caused fisheries to become the most mismanaged resource economy in early-twentieth-century Canada.

Eating the Ocean | McGill-Queen’s University Press

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH L. H. Roper’s review of “Global Trade and the Shaping of English Freedom” by William A. Pettigrew

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241306496

This book offers a new account of the connections between seventeenth century English history and the history of the rest of the world. Eschewing nationalist narratives, it demonstrates how greater engagement with the world beyond Europe shaped signature aspects of the English experience. Early modern trading corporations are the central actors in the story. Global Trade and the Shaping of English Freedom offers a profoundly altered reading of the practices of these entities. The companies were not monolithic entities pursuing narrow nationalist interests overseas. Nor were they inefficient monopolies doomed to commercial failure. In the seventeenth century, as this book shows, they were driven and transformed by the immediate and local interests of Company agents and their foreign networks. Because the trading companies were the most important bridge between international contexts and English legal and political debates, they connect non-European power and preference to those debates. These unappreciated actors within the corporate sphere play leading roles in this book as the shapers of English debate about the meaning of English freedom and the futures of the trades they participated in overseas. The book offers a new perspective on the foreign actors who shaped English commercial and legal ideas and practices in the seventeenth century, as well as the Ottoman, Bantenese, Huedan, Siamese, and Mughal contributions to the ideological, institutional, and procedural underpinnings that would develop, slowly but surely, into the British Empire.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/global-trade-and-the-shaping-of-english-freedom-9780198846710?cc=ro&lang=en&

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Graham Moore’s review of “Cultural Representations of Piracy in England, Spain and the Caribbean: Travelers, Traders, and Traitors, 1570 to 1604” by Mariana-Cecilia Velázquez

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241306498

This book examines the concept of piracy as an instrument for the advancement of legal, economic, and political agendas associated with early modern imperial conflicts in the Caribbean.

Drawing on historical accounts, literary texts, legal treatises, and maps, the book traces the visual and narrative representations of Sir Francis Drake, who serves as a case study to understand the various usages of the terms “pirate” and “corsair.” Through a comparative analysis, the book considers the connotations of the categories related to maritime predation—pirate, corsair, buccaneer, and filibuster—and nationalistic and religious denominations—Lutheran, Catholic, heretic, Spaniard, English, and Creole—to argue that the flexible usage of these terms corresponds to unequal colonial and imperial relations and ideological struggles.

The book chronologically records the process by which piracy changed from an unregulated phenomenon to becoming legally defined after the Treaty of London (1604) and the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). The research demonstrates that as piracy grew less ambiguous through legal and linguistic standardization, the concept of piracy lost its polemical utility.

This interdisciplinary volume is ideal for researchers working in piracy studies, early modern history, and imperial history.

https://www.routledge.com/Cultural-Representations-of-Piracy-in-England-Spain-and-the-Caribbean-Travelers-Traders-and-Traitors-1570-to-1604/Velazquez/p/book/9780367693572?srsltid=AfmBOopVP4g1LdHu2hOc79-0vTskJaEDJi-d1FsMV4Fhz_pd6lz8bDhd

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Sara Caputo’s review of “The Naval Government of Newfoundland in the French Wars 1793–1815” by John Morrow

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241307438

Exploring the professional and political ideas of Newfoundland naval governors during the French Wars, this book traces the evolution of the Naval Governorship and administration of the region, shedding a light on a critical period of its early modern history.

Contextualising Newfoundland as part of Britain’s broader Atlantic Empire, Morrow focuses on the years 1793-1815 as it transitioned from a largely migratory fishery and ‘nursery of seaman’ to a colonial settlement with a resident British and Irish population. With a diversifying economy and growing demography amidst the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the governors of Newfoundland faced a unique set of challenges. Drawing upon various primary and secondary sources, Morrow provides a comprehensive account of their responses to the perceived needs of those they governed – both settler and indigenous – and reveals the professional attitudes and attributes they brought to bear on both their civil and military responsibilities.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/naval-government-of-newfoundland-in-the-french-wars-9781350383197/

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Dan Swanbeck’s review of “Phoenicians among Others: Why Migrants Mattered in the Ancient Mediterranean” by Denise Demetriou

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241306490

Phoenicians among Others provides the first history of Phoenician immigrants in the ancient Mediterranean from the fourth to the first centuries bce. Through an examination of inscriptions, many bilingual in Phoenician and Greek or Egyptian, Phoenicians among Others demonstrates how mobility and migration challenged migrants and states alike. Far from being excluded, and despite facing prejudices, immigrants mobilized adaptive strategies to mediate their experiences and encourage a sense of membership and belonging, constructed new identities, and transformed the societies they joined. By integrating the voices and histories of immigrants with those of the states in which they lived, the book demonstrates the diverse ways migrants influenced the development of societies, introduced new institutions, shaped the policies of their home and host states, made notions of citizenship more fluid, and changed the course of local, regional, and Mediterranean histories.

https://academic.oup.com/book/46470

Read (subscription needed) in the February 2025 issue of the IJMH Cory Davis’ review of “On the Waves of Empire: U.S. Imperialism and Merchant Sailors, 1872–1924” by William D. Riddell

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/08438714241309507

This book explores how class conflict shaped U.S. imperial expansion between the 1870s and 1920s. It shows how class struggle between white merchant sailors and shipping capital powerfully informed an emerging U.S. imperial system, and how that struggle shaped and reshaped the system’s internal and external boundaries. Sailors were among a handful of workers who crisscrossed these boundaries every time they went to work. More conceptually, this book examines where citizenship ends and subjecthood begins or, more precisely, where it overlaps. It is about whom citizenship and subjecthood overlapped within and where they overlapped–where the metropole or nation became the empire or the colony, what that meant, and why it mattered. The struggle between white merchant sailors and U.S. shipping companies demonstrates that the lines between nation and empire and foreign and domestic were contested spaces of racially inflected class conflict centered around extending the country’s racialized immigration regime to both U.S. colonial possessions and U.S. flagged merchant ships. The conflict over these imperial boundaries illustrated the real-life consequences they held for working people. These were not just abstractions. These lines often determined the type of labor systems within which workers toiled. An analytical focus on sailors also helps us see empire and imperial boundary formation as a process in motion.

https://academic.oup.com/illinois-scholarship-online/book/55632