Forum Introduction: Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

Abstract In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new patterns of knowledge, credit, and capital were created by global expansion. These, in turn, created new opportunities for groups of people who previously had little access to global trade. These individuals—women as well as men—increasingly engaged in commercial transactions, some of them relatively autonomous, others challenged and hindered by various forms of institutional control and constraint. Emphasising the intimate nature of networks means examining the quality rather than the quantity of certain networks, which ultimately facilitates a shift away from well-known historical agents such as influential merchants, powerful politicians, and various nobility and royals. The Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period forum seeks to add to our knowledge of the diverse ways that intimate economic networks developed in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, in Europe as well as en route elsewhere, among the well-off as well as the relatively poor, and among free people as well as the enslaved.