The Mercantile Effect: On Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World during the 17th and 18th Centuries

This lavishly illustrated book collects papers delivered at the third Gingko conference: “The Mercantile Effect: On Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World During 17th ̶18th Centuries.”

Held in Berlin, this meeting brought together a group of established and early-career scholars to discuss how the movement of Armenian, Indian, Chinese, Persian, Turkish, and European merchants and their trade goods spread new ideas and new technologies across Western Asia in the early modern era. Through the newly-established Dutch, English, and French East India companies, as well as much older mercantile networks, prestigious exotic commodities—silk, ivory, books, glazed porcelains—were transported east and west. The collected essays in this volume introduce a fascinating array of not only trade objects but also customs and traditions that bring this period of intense cultural interplay to life.

Table of Contents:
–Foreword by Melanie Gibson Introduction by Sussan Babaie The Mercantile Effect: On Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World
-Suet May Lam – Fantasies of the East: ‘Shopping’ in Early Modern Eurasia
-Amy S. Landau – The Armenian Artist Minas and Seventeenth-Century Notions of ‘Life-Likeness’
-William Kynan-Wilson – ‘Painted by the Turcks themselves’: Reading Peter Mundy’s Ottoman Costume Album in Context
-Nicole Kançal-Ferrari – Golden Watches and Precious Textiles: Luxury Goods at the Crimean Khans’ Court and the Northern Black Sea Shore
-Nancy Um – Aromatics, Stimulants, and their Vessels: The Material Culture and Rites of Merchant Interaction in Eighteenth-Century Mocha
-Federica Gigante – Trading Islamic Artworks in Seventeenth-Century Italy: the Case of the Cospi Museum
-Anna Ballian – From Genoa to Constantinople: The Silk Industry of Chios
-Christos Merantzas – Ottoman Textiles Within an Ecclesiastical Context: Cultural Osmoses in Mainland Greece
-Francesco Gusella – Behind the Practice of Partnership: Seventeenth-Century Portuguese Devotional Ivories of West India
-Gül Kale – Visual and Embodied Memory of an Ottoman Architect: Travelling on Campaign, Pilgrimage and Trade Routes in the Middle East
Contributors

Bibliographic Information

Title: The Mercantile Effect: On Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World during the 17th and 18th Centuries

Editors: Melanie Gibson and Sussan Babaie

Publisher: Gingko Library

 Language: English

Length: 160 pages

ISBN: 978-1909942103

Pub. Date: February 15, 2018