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This book provides an insight into the world of commodity trading companies, depicted as the hidden companies of the global economy and showcases how they were instrumental in bringing about the economic integration of new commodities and far-flung regions into the first global economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
List of contents
Introduction: Creating global capitalism: An introduction to commodity trading companies and the first global economy
1. From traders to planters: The evolving role and importance of trading companies in the 19th century Anglo-Indian Indigo trade
2. Foreign merchant businesses and the integration of the Black and Azov Seas of the Russian Empire into the First global economy
3. Sourcing and shipping museum objects from East Africa to the Smithsonian, 1887-1891
4. Global trading companies in the commodity chain of rubber between 1890 and the 1920s
5. Mitsui Bussan and the Manchurian soybean trade: Geopolitics and economic strategies in China's Northeast, ca. 1870s-1920s
6. Branding and retail strategy in the condensed milk trade: Borden and Nestlé in East Asia, 1870-1929
7. Natural born merchants. The Hudson Bay Company, science and Canada's final fur frontiers (1925-1931)
About the author
Espen Storli is Professor of History at the Department of History and Modern Society at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research interests include the history of natural resource extraction, commodity trading, and cartels.
Marten Boon is Lecturer in History of International Relations at Utrecht University. He holds a PhD in economic and business history from Erasmus University. His research interest focuses on the business and transnational history of energy, with a particular focus on the oil and gas industry in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
Summary
This book provides an insight into the world of commodity trading companies, depicted as the hidden companies of the global economy and showcases how they were instrumental in bringing about the economic integration of new commodities and far-flung regions into the first global economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
