The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World

Gerritsen and Riello's The Global Lives of Things is a truly ground-breaking collection of essays. The volume bestrides the intersection of two of the most important recent developments in the study of history - the material turn and the global turn - and is the first to apply these in so concerted a way to the early modern period . The individual contributions, which range across Europe, China, India and Australia, and which consider commodities including sharkskin, coral and tobacco, are uniformly strong; together they highlight the connections between the local and the microcosmic and the international and the macrocosmic, to give a much better sense of the way early moderns lived their lives. This volume will be required reading not only for students of the early modern period, but also for those interested in the 'things' that have been used in the past, and the global connections which often lay behind them.

- Kenneth Austin, University of Bristol, UK

This pathbreaking volume explores how materials, artefacts and commodities traveled across the globe in the early modern period. Its object lessons shed light on how things in circulation could acquire new meanings and values, transform social relations, shape the environment, and set in motion novel constellations of knowledge. Combining approaches from material culture, economic history, consumption studies, and the history of science, The Global Lives of Things offers a perfect example of how global history needs to be studied in context.

- Daniel Margocsy, Hunter College, The City University of New York, USA

Overall, this volume makes a valuable contribution to an emerging field (...) Summing Up: Recommended

- J. Werner, Western Michigan University in CHOICE

The editors and Routledge should be acknowledged for taking the various essays with their differing lengths and making them read smoothly as part of the same volume. (...) The chapters are well illustrated, and although there is not a map in every one, readers can locate the places mentioned in a particular text by looking at the maps contained in other chapters. Readers looking to deepen their knowledge of either the general trends or the particular details of the objects discussed, can avail themselves of the rich endnotes included with each chapter. As a result, both readers well-versed in the topics discussed, as well as those for whom they are completely new, will find, as Findlen notes in her afterword, that small things can tell big stories (page 244).

- James G. Schryver, University of Minnesota