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This chapter shows that once the Jews became literate, urban, and engaged in skilled occupations, they began migrating within the vast territory under Muslim rule—stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to India during the eighth through the twelfth centuries, and from the Byzantine Empire to western Europe via Italy and within western Europe in the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. In early medieval Europe, the revival of trade concomitant with the Commercial Revolution and the growth of an urban and commercial economy paralleled the vast urbanization and the growth of trade that had occurred in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates four to five centuries earlier. The Jewish diaspora during the early Middle Ages was mainly the outcome of literate Jewish craftsmen, shopkeepers, traders, scholars, teachers, physicians, and moneylenders migrating in search of business opportunities to reap returns on their investment in literacy and education.

This chapter considers the possibility of building a maritime monarchy and how the Anglo-Dutch Revolution achieved this. Early modern Europe was governed by territorial monarchies and small, sometimes maritime, republics and/or cities. The former were culturally and socially aristocratic, and the latter mercantile. But in the later seventeenth century, a new European great power emerged that was a territorial monarchy within which a landed aristocracy, enriched by the economic changes of the period, beginning with those revolutionizing agricultural productivity, became fully participant in its new commercial economy. The way in which Britain's ruling class in both Houses of Parliament intertwined hereditary nobility and a mercantile, manufacturing, and financial oligarchy had no European parallel. The strict separation of the world of work from socially mandated aristocratic idleness which applied elsewhere had disappeared.

This chapter considers the ways in which the stock of groceries available to English consumers was transformed during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The overall context for reappraising the impact of new groceries on English retailing is laid out in terms of the shifting geography of supply and the growing importance of empire in provisioning English consumers. The chapter then assesses how far grocers were able to capitalise on demand for new imported goods, and the ways in which these helped to stimulate more general growth in retailing, as Shammas suggests. This chapter argues that grocers quickly came to dominate the provision of tea, coffee, etc. Lastly, the chapter examines the extent to which these goods carried associations of empire, and argues that imperial associations formed just one point of reference for the shopkeeper and consumer.

This chapter focuses on the city of Bèjaïa, the capital of the region of Kabylia, a province that has maintained a largely self-professed Berber, as opposed to Arab or French, identity. The surrounding countryside was heartland of the ‘Berber Spring’, an uprising against Arabization in the 1980s. In terms of political power, Bèjaïa was slightly under the control of the vast and powerful Almohad Empire. Although Arabs comprised part of their army and administration, and many claimed Arab blood, the Almohads were primarily Berbers. This coming of the Almohads corresponded with the Commercial Revolution — a great increase in trade and commerce. However, North Africa contributed far more than raw goods; it also shared with Europe some of the most advanced spiritual ideas.

This chapter sets out the key research questions addressed in the book. These concern the role of English towns in the commercial revolution that was underway in the thirteenth century. There is a particular focus on the medieval property market, and on the citizens who were active in that market. The chapter reviews previous literature, and explains the choice of Cambridge as a case study. This choice is largely dictated by a unique source of information, namely the Cambridge Hundred Rolls, which are also described in this chapter. The Hundred Rolls date to 1279, but the origins of the town were much earlier. The early history of the town is set out, so that the context of the Hundred Rolls can be fully understood.

The Conclusion considers the significance of the decline of the Company of Merchant Adventurers in light of the broader structural changes that English overseas commerce underwent in the early modern period. It argues that, although the Company of Merchant Adventurers can not straightforwardly be associated with a precapitalist commercial order rendered irrelevant by the emergence of capitalism, the story of the Company’s decline does cast light on a process of commercial restructuring which involved the breakdown of certain boundaries, geographical and occupational, and the possibility of new synergies. These changes had implications for the role and career of the overseas merchant, and the place of merchant companies in structuring access to foreign trade. Survival for merchant companies depended on their ability to attract and accommodate new members and retain their loyalty, as well as to survive external attack. Changes within the Merchant Adventurers’ ranks made this increasingly difficult, and the Company’s failure to maintain its privileges was in part a consequence of the dissolution of the social system of its trade.

This introductory chapter provides the background for the story of interaction between Berbers, Arabs, Latins, Muslims, Christians, and Jews in North Africa and Latin Europe and across the Western Mediterranean. The book locates a high tide of the Second Axial Age in the twelfth century, mid-point between the first Muslim conquests to, roughly, the first half of the fifteenth century in the Western Mediterranean. The twelfth century was a period when both Latin Christian Europe and Arabo-Berber Almohad North Africa were fairly evenly matched, and when the Commercial Revolution and Renaissance of the Twelfth Century were at their height in both Europe and North Africa. The book ends with the fourteenth century seen through the eyes of Ibn Khaldun, before the fall of Granada and the discovery of a new West.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about English poet John Milton's works as they relate to the commercial revolution. This volume examines the texts produced by Milton up to the end of the Anglo-Dutch Wars in 1674 focusing on those that represented or consciously engaged economic subjects and forms of analysis. It also compares the writings of Milton with those of his immediate contemporaries including Sir William Davenant, Edmund Waller, Sir John Denham, John Dryden, and Sir William Petty.

Introduction of the cash register in 1879 prompted corner grocers to take steps toward controlling and routinizing retail transactions. This chapter agues that it was the smallest retailers who were early adopters of the latest information technology and not “big business,” as many historians contend. Grocers helped transform cash and credit transactions from nib and ink markings to mechanically monitored and controlled exchanges between clerks and customers, initiating a new level of surveillance over cash flows. In this way, small grocers stood on the front lines of a commercial revolution, pioneering new methods to document and regulate the growing tide of money and customers who frequented commercial spaces.