This paper introduces an innovative method applied to global (economic) history using the tools of digital humanities through the design and development of the GECEM Project Database (www.gecem.eu; www.gecemdatabase.eu). This novel database goes beyond the static Excel files frequently used by conventional scholarship in early modern history studies to mine new historical data through a bottom-up process and analyse the global circulation of goods, consumer behaviour, and trade networks in early modern China and Europe. Macau and Marseille, as strategic entrepôts for the redistribution of goods, serve as the main case study. This research is framed within a polycentric approach to analyse the connectivity of south Chinese and European markets with trade zones of Spain, France, South America, and the Pacific, This research has been sponsored and financially supported by GECEM (Global Encounters between China and Europe: Trade Networks, Consumption and Cultural Exchanges in Macau and Marseille, 1680–1840), a project hosted by the Pablo de Olavide University (UPO) of Seville (Spain) and funded by ERC Starting-Grant, ref. 679371, under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, www.gecem.eu

El presente ensayo aborda el impacto que ha ejercido la disciplina de la Historia Global en las últimas décadas, prestando especial atención a los estudios relativos al consumo y circulación de nuevos productos en Europa y en los mercados asiáticos. El objetivo principal de este artículo es, por tanto, presentar un balance historiográfico sobre el impacto de la Historia Global, en el que observamos que, para el caso de los estudios de consumo en particular, ha tenido un marcado tinte eurocentrista. El análisis del mundo británico, y sus colonias, como motor de la primera industrialización, ha sido una de las principales causas en el marcado enfoque eurocentrista de los estudios de Historia Global. Este enfoque comenzó a cambiar con el creciente interés por el estudio de China y su rol en la economía global. Se presenta de este modo un recorrido historiográfico por ambos espacios, para concluir este artículo con un caso de estudio comparativo entre Macao y Marsella como puertos transnacionales. Este proyecto acaba de empezar, por lo que se presentan sus líneas principales.

In 1648, a Portuguese ship that left Macau sank off the coast of the Philippines. The local authorities in Manila confiscated and sold all of its goods. This led to a dispute with the Jesuits, who claimed a certain amount of musk belonging to the Vice Province of China, the sale of which would support their religious mission. This article offers an analysis of this event, focusing on the dispute between the mentioned parties, but also as an example of the complex global networks of goods exchanges and economic interests in these regions of Southeast Asia in the middle of the seventeenth century.

El mundo está cubierto de mercancías de origen chino: esto no es
producto de la globalización reciente, es una historia de larga data. El consumo
de porcelanas, sedas y especiería de China fascinó a Europa hace siglos
y ese apetito fue traído a América e hizo de este vínculo el más virtuoso
enlace con el Viejo Mundo. La plata americana abrió las puertas de los
mercados de China, Indochina e India al consumo americano. La regulación
impuesta por Felipe II, consistente en limitar y centralizar las travesías
a Oriente, conforme avanzaron los años no logró constreñir el mercado,
regular los precios ni detener el flujo de plata. La Nao de Filipinas era el
vehículo de la defraudación, el contrabando y la más inequívoca expresión
de que con plata se compraba cualquier mercancía oriental.

Desde hace años los historiadores que han trabajado en comprender mejor el proceso de formación de los estados modernos han coincidido en destacar que un factor muy importante del éxito de estas instituciones pasó siempre por sus mejores o peores capacidades a la hora de movilizar recursos estratégicos. Por esta razón es razonable dedicar este trabajo para analizar la importancia del cáñamo como un producto estratégico por el que el Imperio español estableció un abastecimiento desde España que garantizara el dominio y la defensa de los nuevos espacios ultramarinos. Y, al mismo tiempo, la monarquía realizó un gran esfuerzo en fomentar el cultivo cannabáceo en América provocando con ello el establecimiento de rutas de circulación de esta fibra por los diferentes mercados regionales de consumo en la costa del Pacífico.

This research focuses on the operations of the Royal Company of the Philippines in the global market, in particular on the slave trade between Africa and Spanish America, as a way to examine the local dimensions of global trade. It identifies the causes and consequences of a failed venture that, despite its failure, opened a new cycle in the Río de la Plata slave trade and its place in the global economy of the late eighteenth century.

One of the sources that allow us to analyse certain consumption patterns are trade balances. These documents are especially relevant in the case of island colonies, such as Cuba, that depended on the outside world for many kinds of supplies, not just the basic ones. Despite their limitations, data on imported goods from Havana's balance of trade at the dawn of the nineteenth century allow us to examine the consumer goods that were most in demand in Cuba at that time. This essay uses that information to emphasise the relationship between colony and metropole in terms of material culture, with a particular focus on the core items of food, clothing and household goods. Overall, patterns of consumption reflect patterns of production and imports.

This article analyses the higher education systems in the European Union (EU) and China, and the influence of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, yidai yilu) on the implementation, development and reforms of an international agenda. It also takes into consideration the development of EU-China cooperation in education and academia through research and scientific programmes launched in recent years, as well as the role of some key institutions such as the Confucius Institutes. To this end, the aim is to analyse China's "soft power" policy and its link with the novel concept of "academic diplomacy" introduced in this article to describe the engagement and academic international cooperation between the EU and China. Such reforms and promotion of collaboration with the EU have ultimately promoted China's influence and visibility in the global arena.

From the second half of sixteenth century, Chinese silk goods entered into the markets of the Spanish Empire, including its European territories. By the early eighteenth century, the supply of this Asian good increased across Europe because of the rise of trade companies settled in the Far East. This article aims to know the specific silk markets where Chinese silk goods penetrated in Seville in the first half of eighteenth century by analyzing consumption with notarial sources as probate inventories and dowry letters.

La Carrera de Indias que unió Sevilla con el istmo de Panamá y que vehiculó la expansión atlántica de los pueblos ibéricos, ha sido tradicionalmente entendida como el eje de la llamada ¿primera globalización¿ y como motor del ¿Rise of the West¿. El auge y decadencia de esta arteria del imperio suelen ser analizados respecto a las economías hispanoamericanas, pero independientemente de otros procesos más generales. A partir de la discusión crítica de la bibliografía, este artículo sitúa una ruta tan preciada en un contexto más amplio. Partiendo de la premisa de que la expansión europea en el Atlántico sólo fue parte de un proceso más vasto de raíces múltiples, se señala la existencia de diferentes proyectos de globalización que rivalizaron entre sí. La fecha de 1640 marca un momento álgido en dichas rivalidades y aparece como un parteaguas que permite explicar de una manera más profunda la crisis de la Carrera de Indias y la suerte de los imperios ibéricos. Si la historia de la globalización y de los imperios se han estudiado como dos procesos paralelos e interrelacionados, aquí se enfatiza cómo la globalización también podía detonar crisis imperiales, forzando al imperio español a resituarse.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of the aristocracy within the recruitment crisis suffered by
the Hispanic Monarchy during the second half of the 17th century. In order to do so, we have resorted to the
important archive sources that are conserved, both at a national and local level. With them we have been
able to reconstruct the role of the nobility in a specific levy. At a time of crisis, the monarchy used a new
formula, resorting to aristocracy to manage the enlistment of volunteers in charge of the Royal Treasury in
different districts, turning the nobles into occasional managers of recruitment, a formula very different from
the traditional one.

This article discusses the application of new technologies, software coding and computer analysis in the social sciences and humanities, mainly in the field of economic history. In the last two decades, the use of new computer technologies among historians to develop theories and solve questions has fostered a vibrant historiographical debate. However, these new digital tools have largely been used as an end in themselves, rather than as a means to develop hypotheses and answer questions. This has prevented researchers from fully exploiting such technologies in their field. In this article, I discuss how I designed a new multi-relational database using the ¿Access¿ package and SQL language to test the ¿industrious revolution¿ hypothesis and present the ¿vicarious consumption¿ theory as an alternative model for analyzing the eighteenth-century circulation of Chinese goods in the Western Mediterranean region. It presents the cross-referencing method I used to analyze the historical information I collected, mainly from probate inventories and trade records. This method makes it possible to navigate through the data in a way that goes beyond the traditional use of ¿excel¿ tables.

Global history is in some instances a very sensitive field, challenging
both traditional and sometimes obsolete national narratives. It is crucial
for this project, through concrete case studies, to rethink the ways
in which global history is envisioned and conceptualized in China and
Japan, as well as European and American countries. When a historian
constructs a meta narratives, this will always contain a subjective element
borne out of ideological and national constraints. Therefore, we should
formulate the following pertinent question: how do global events connect
to our local and national communities, and, by extension, to our
academic environment?

The introduction of American cereal crops is probably one of the most
important events in China¿s agricultural history, having a great effect on
the agriculture production, national life, the transformation
of consumer behaviour and, to some extent, the nationalization
of consumption. The sweet potato (Ipomoea Batatas L.), in Chinese
g¿nsh¿ ¿¿, is a staple food crop for ancient Chinese society. Today it
still plays an important role in Chinese daily life, as well as guaranteeing
national food security.

This article provides an initial (partial) estimate of silver quantities held within China around mid-18th century, utilising archival evidence related to wealth confiscations. Better future estimates for overall Chinese silver holdings could also facilitate more accurate estimation of Chinese silver (legal plus illegal) imports. Similar analyses for other world regions could eventually yield estimates for global silver stock holdings, useful in turn for improving global silver mining and trade flow estimates. Extensive contraband silver mining and silver trade are known to have escaped official recordation, by definition. If methodologies suggested herein prove successful, then parallel non-silver-trade-good estimates could follow. Current exclusive focus upon production and trade flows should be reevaluated in the context of linkages with accumulations of goods (wealth components). Economic history could someday provide a prominent stage for the historical study of wealth holdings, thereby furnishing context for increasing wealth concentrations observable worldwide today.

This paper introduces an innovative method applied to global (economic) history using the tools of digital humanities through the design and development of the GECEM Project Database (www.gecem.eu; www.gecemdatabase.eu). This novel database goes beyond the static Excel files frequently used by conventional scholarship in early modern history studies to mine new historical data through a bottom-up process and analyse the global circulation of goods, consumer behaviour, and trade networks in early modern China and Europe. Macau and Marseille, as strategic entrepôts for the redistribution of goods, serve as the main case study. This research is framed within a polycentric approach to analyse the connectivity of south Chinese and European markets with trade zones of Spain, France, South America, and the Pacific.

The present paper intends to contribute with new information to a reconstruction of the Sephardic presence in the Macao-Manila commercial network. For this purpose, in the first place, we intend to trace the profile of the Judaeo-converso merchants arriving in China and the Philippines and to reconstruct the commercial networks to which they belonged during the 16th and early 17th centuries.

The important role of Chinese demand for silver in stimulating worldwide silver-mining and shaping the first truly global trading system has become commonly recognised in the world history scholarship. The commercial dynamism of China during the 16th-19th centuries was integrally related to the importation of foreign silver, initially from Japan but principally from Latin America. Yet the significance of imports of Latin American silver for the Chinese economy changed substantially over these three centuries in tandem with the rhythms of China's domestic economy as well as the global trading system. This article traces these changes, including the adoption of a new standard money of account¿the yuan¿derived from the Spanish silver peso coin.

Due to China's ongoing economic rise, recent studies in global (economic) history have moved away from the traditional Eurocentric view to a Sinocentric one. There is extensive literature focused on the introduction of Chinese goods to Europe, as well as on China's economic development within the framework of the great divergence debate. However, less research has centred on the introduction of European goods to Chinese markets, specifically the markets in Guangdong or other coastal regions (such as Fujian, Zhejiang and Jiangsu), before the First Opium War. This paper aims to side-step the Sinocentric approach, eschewing the current wave of national history in China, by analysing the international trade in Qing China from the Kangxi era until the Qianlong period. It provides new empirical evidence from the First Historical Archives of China (FHAC) by examining the impact on global trade of China's imperial edicts and interventionist policies.

Local historical documents originated from daily life of people belong to special collection resources that were not published publicly. They are valuable assets of universities and libraries. At present, most documents had only finished digitalization or partial datalization work. However, the requirements of deep knowledge mining in documents data, providing visual analysis, and effectively supporting the research of historic humanities scholars had not been fully met. Taking the local historical documents project of Shanghai Jiao Tong University as an example, using relevant techniques of digital humanities (DH), the in-depth analysis and utilization research of documents data were carried out. On the one hand, the core database of the documents was established based on standardizing metadata cataloguing and establishing metadata association. On the other hand, based on the core database, an intelligent DH system platform was constructed. The platform is to realize full-field retrieval and display of the documents, text analysis, association analysis, statistics, and visual presentation of knowledge. In addition, in the process of using the platform for research, humanities scholars can continuously expand the data dimensions and the relationships between data, achieve intelligent supplementation of documents data and platform self-learning. The concept of DH has led to a new direction of database construction and platform development. In the exploration and practice of DH, libraries should continue to widen thinking, improve service and innovation capabilities, and provide better research perspectives, research environments, research support, and research experience for humanities scholars.

Judeo-conversos played a very important role in the Atlantic trade carried
out by Portugal and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries;
yet, their presence in China and Japan, barring some specific cases,
has remained unknown. The first reason for this absence is due to the
fact that the inquisitorial records collected in Goa and covering the
Portuguese communities established in these regions have not survived.
The second reason is related to the very morphology of this group commonly
known as Nação Portuguesa (Portuguese nation: this is how the
Portuguese Jews would refer to themselves). Spread over several continents
and empires, managing to stay socially connected, the Judeoconversos
who participated and created commercial networks as their
diaspora extended from the Iberian Peninsula to Macau and Nagasaki
also developed various strategies to remain hidden.

In the eighteenth century, all European colonial empires undertook the task of institutionalising their postal systems. Within the framework of the Bourbon reforms, the Spanish monarchy embarked upon reforming the postal system within the Spanish America with the aim of making transatlantic communications more reliable and regular. These plans, however, were hampered by an ongoing power struggle between all agents with a stake in the circulation of information. This is clearly reflected in the postal office in Cartagena de Indias, which was a key node for the Crown and a point of confluence for the strategies and interests of different local and global powers; the office, therefore, represented the polyhedric reality of postal communication. This paper shows that the institution had its own agency by constituting one of the main power tools, which is a reflection of the close relationship that exists between empire and communication.

Social network analysis is one of the methods of digital humanistic analysis. In this paper, we
take the digital resources of contract documents of Shanghai Jiao Tong University as research data, and
MATLAB as research tool, to carry out social network analysis and visualization. Through data processing,
we can effectively acquire network nodes and network degree data, fit the power-law distribution based
on the number of participants, detect and categorize legit community, and reveal the characteristics and
structure of digital humanities and social network in digital resources.

This thesis explores the silk trade in China and Europe at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth century through a transnational point of view, taking an example of France, by comparing the imperial silk factories of the Emperor Kangxi of Qing Dynasty (1661-1722) and the Grande Fabrique of Luis XVIII of France (1643-1715), analyzes the variation of business organization system, the manufacturing equipment scale, finance, personnel management, income and social status of the craftsmen, product types and sales, etc., which reflected the differences of the economic development strategies of the two monarchs; Like a butterfly effect, it could be inferred from the details of the official silk production and consumption in the studied geographical and time range, the causes and effects of diverse economic and political roads each monarch took subsequently.

Se explora el impacto de las mercancías asiáticas en el Rio de la Plata a partir de la navegación de dos fragatas de la Real Compañía de Filipinas, que forzadas por el conflicto marítimo angloespañol recalan en el estuario rioplatense. A partir del examen de valores y características de la carga del "comercio de pacotilla", se analiza la distribución de los efectos de China, Filipinas y particularmente de la India, en la cuenca portuaria, el Interior del virreinato y sus conexiones con el espacio altoperuano, transandino y del Litoral. El episodio permite advertir la distribución de la oferta de mercancías, a los actores de este tráfico y evaluar el papel de la compañía en el mercado global de efectos asiáticos.

This project offers a comparative and polycentric approach to the connection of trade nodes in the Asian, American, African, and European markets in the early modern period. These analyses reevaluate the great divergence debate by presenting new case studies at the local scale and observing the impact of global goods and changes in consumer behaviour connecting local markets of the Pacific and Atlantic area. In this manner, we explore the circulation and consumption of Chinese goods in the Americas and in Europe, as well as in the African slave market through the Royal Company of the Philippines. Conversely, we also analyse the impact of the introduction of Western goods (of American and European origin) into China.

This chapter aims at drawing attention to the role of the Spanish
Empire in the circulation of technology and technological knowledge
during this epoch. It focuses on the role of informal institutions and
social networks regulating such circulation and examines the relationship
between political power and the control of technological knowledge, as
well as the often-simplified interplay between globalization and empire.

This monographic issue of the RHE-JILAEH presents new case studies in order to compare regions of Asia, Europe and the Americas through analysis of global demand for western goods in China (goods of European and American origin) as well as demand eastern goods (of Chinese and Indian origin) in Europe and the Americas. The global circulation of goods included accumulation of American silver in the hands of Chinese merchants and private institutions. Thus, this issue re-evaluates origins of the first globalisation during the 16th century, as opposed to the 1820s. Global trade networks and long-distance alliances in Asia, the Americas and Europe date back to the 16th century when Manila galleon routes were established.

El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar una visión general de los aspectos que articulan
la relación estratégica existente entre Europa y China, centrándose en la cooperación
y movilidad científica promovida por la Comisión Europea y el Ministerio de Educación
de China, durante los últimos años. La visión comparada entre China y los
Estados Unidos de América en lo referente a movilidad e intercambios científicos resulta
necesaria, ya que el flujo migratorio de origen chino ha tenido siempre como destino
principal suelo estadounidense. El objetivo de la cooperación sino-europea se basa en
la introducción de reformas en el sistema de educación superior con el fin de erradicar
la 'fuga de cerebros' que ha afectado dramáticamente a la nación asiática y a los
países miembros de la Unión Europea.

En el presente ensayo se estudian las percepciones y diálogos entre China y Europa mediante el análisis de áreas geopolíticas estratégicas que fomentaron el comercio, las relaciones internacionales y redes socio-económicas entre China y Europa. Nos centramos en un particular caso de estudio comparativo: Macao, como puerto que conecta con el sur de China y las rutas del galeón Manila-Acapulco, siendo eje vertebrador de una temprana globalización que integraba los mercados de Occidente y Oriente; y Marsella, como enclave portuario en el Mediterráneo que enlaza con las rutas de comercio oriental. Tal comparación puede ayudar a enriquecer el debate sobre la gran divergencia mediante un caso de estudio concreto con el fin de observar los asimétricos modelos de crecimiento económico de China y Europa a través del análisis de redes de comercio y cambios en el consumo.