Preliminary Programme

Though the fires of discord burn between the two parties, Muslim and Christian, two armies of them may meet and dispose themselves in battle array, and yet Muslim and Christian travelers will come and go between them without interference… not one of the…merchants was stopped or hindered. (Ibn Jubayr, September 1184)
Over the course of the two-hundred-year history of the Latin Kingdom, both the Muslim and Christian sides recognized the practical importance of trade, at both the civilian and the military-political levels. As reflected in chronicle sources and in descriptions of treaty terms, trade was a predominant factor from the earliest encounters between Crusaders and Muslims in the Latin East. Although both sides traditionally protected merchants during war, it is possible to trace different attitudes towards the inclusion of trade in peace treaties: whereas the crusaders thought it shameful to use trade as a pretext for making peace, for the Muslim side this was considered most acceptable and mercantile interests loomed large in peace treaties between the Muslims and the Italian communes. So important was trade to the economies of both parties to the conflict, that attempts to use the weapon of embargo by both kings and by the papacy usually failed. Indeed, thinking their trade indispensable to the region, the thirteenth-century Frankish colony in Latin East was complacent about its real situation. In the end (1291) notwithstanding the peaceful relations established through trade, religious fervor as well as changes in international trade routes brought the Latin Kingdom down. (Show less)

This paper will examine critically the problem of religion in relation to cross-cultural trade, focusing on studies probing the economic or religious effects of economic exchange between members of different faiths. After contrasting work on the subject by anthropologists, world historians, scholars of religion and economists, the paper will reflect historically on twentieth-century interpretative trends. It will show how an interest in free trade, economic development, religious tolerance, globalization, or cultural resistance, has shaped scholarly agendas. Finally, it will propose categories for analyzing commodities crossing cultural boundaries, distinguishing neutral goods from religiously polarizing goods.

Early on in the twentieth century, with studies by Bronislaw Malinowski on the kula trade and by Marcel Mauss on gift-giving, anthropologists began to reflect systematically on the cultural meaning of non-capitalistic systems of exchange. Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, and Nicholas Thomas, among others, developed this field, focusing on tensions and conflicts that emerge when merchants and goods cross a high cultural boundary. When trading parties belong to very different economic and religious systems, exchanges can easily give rise to violence and miscommunication; and these trades gone wrong serve anthropologists to understand the basis of cultural difference.

Historians have dealt with similar issues most effectively when they have studied the encounter between the old and the new worlds and between colonialist and indigenous cultures. But in recent times they have begun to use the term “cross-cultural” trade loosely as a synonym for “long-distance” or “international” trade, or for any material exchange that involves members of different religious groups. Such usage is unfortunate if it robs the term of its power to designate specifically trades that cross a cultural boundary. Goods and merchants that flow easily between parties, without giving rise to much conflict, express different dynamics: a situation where foreign commodities and persons are perceived as non-threatening, for religious or political reasons; a situation where the native population resents foreign dominance, yet fears the violent consequences of resistance; or a situation where, as a result of acculturation, everyday exchanges rarely result in violence. Arguably, when opposition to material exchange is episodic rather than systemic, then the historian faces what should be designated neither “cross-cultural” nor “inter-cultural” trade, but something between and betwixt —- trade that flows through a cracked dam, which proponents of cultural or religious distinction try desperately to repair, with occasional effect.

The topic of religion and cross-cultural trade presents opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration between economists and scholars of religion. Thus far economists have paid scant attention to religion, which they tend to dismiss as irrelevant economically on the basis of rational choice theory. Scholars of religion have paid more attention to the moral economy than to the real economy, focusing on the system of exchange that theologians envision instead of capitalism. But this terrain has potential. The first group might endeavor to calculate what economic impact, if any, religious affiliation has on cross-cultural exchange, while the other group would begin to probe the effects that such trade presents upon the belief systems in play. (Show less)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between religion and commerce in the Portuguese colonial World by means of the reconstruction of mid-sixteenth century Crown policy toward the specific issue of the trade with Muslims. This trade fell within the traditional field of Canon Law proscriptions on the commerce with the ‘Infidels’, preventing from selling arms, woods, metals and other kinds of goods that could have been used in war against Christians. An object of constant Papal pronouncements, that matter was totally neglected by historians who stressed the importance of economic factors in the history of Portuguese colonization. Recent critics pointed out the vivid tension that existed, still in the first half of the sixteenth century, not between economy and religion, but more properly among contrasting visions of the Empire: ones supported direct State administration, others were attracted by the idea of a more informal control over the commercial routes from Asia and Atlantic Africa to Europe. In that context, the regulation of commerce with the Muslim World became an even more important topic and opened the way to a global reorganization of the trade with ‘Infidels’ in the Portuguese Empire.
The paper will focus on the debates that exploded in 1540s and their concrete consequence, reflecting on how important is in Imperial history to follow the agency of general interest matter in its evolution from a local situation to a global result. The starting point will be an undated account sent to king John III by Pêro Fernandes Sardinha, general vicar of Goa (1545-1548), reporting that many Christians in the Estado da Índia sold horses imported from Middle East to local Muslim purchasers in exchange for diamonds and other valuables. The protest gave rise to a wide discussion in the Kingdom. In 1548 Martín de Azpilcueta, one of the most prominent professor at the University of Coimbra, taught a lesson on the issue (published in 1550). His condemnation helped to sustain an aggressive campaign by the Inquisition of Lisbon against the powerful local merchant community, investing traders who sold spears to the Muslims in North Africa. In 1552 the Portuguese Holy Office was granted the powers over that crime by the Crown. The accused were all linked to the Florentine Luca Giraldi, a great banker and royal lender, who would have been also troubled by the inquisitors in the following years. Since then, however, the Holy Office did not prosecute a considerable number of dealers. On the contrary, the trials opened in 1550s Lisbon look like more as a threatening message to the Portuguese trading world. As a matter of fact, in the second half of the decade, the Mesa da Consciência (a royal council established in 1532) negotiated with the Pope an agreement on the commerce with the Muslims and the ‘Infidels’, that left all the power to the Crown. Finally, in 1560, questioned by the vicar of Arguin, the Mesa fixed the main principles about licit and illicit trades in all the Portuguese Empire. (Show less)

This paper explores some of the ideological, philosophical, and religious concepts and beliefs underpinning the accommodation of interests and the establishment of a sufficient degree of trust that made possible the conduct of cross-cultural and inter-confessional trade in the early modern world. It focuses on the idea that trade promotes peace and friendship, which A. O. Hirschman designated the "doux commerce" theory attributed to Montesquieu. Similar ideas, however, were articulated in the sixteenth-century by such writers as Erasmus, Bodin, Sir Thomas Smith, Grotius, and Richard Hakluyt, one of the founders of the Virginia Company and the author/editor of The Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1st ed. 1589; 2nd ed. 3 vols, 1598-1600). These views themselves derive from earlier sources, going back to Aristotle and the Stoics, which the 4th-century pagan rhetorician Libanius transmitted to the early Church fathers, through his who students included St. John Chrysostom and other prominent Christian figures in Alexandria. In their 16th and early 17th century iterations (and indeed in their late antique ones), these ideas are religiously grounded since they turn on an understanding that God (or, among the pagans, the Gods) had distributed the goods of the world in such a manner to promote exchange between its different parts and peoples, including peoples with different religious traditions and at different levels of civility. The assumption was that all humankind shared universal characteristics— especially the need for material resources to survive and flourish and the rational capacity to identify one's own advantage and promote it. In the hands of Hakluyt, and others, this fact of creation was to be the instrument to reverse the consequences of the Fall, and especially of the divine punishment inflicted on mankind for the Tower of Babel. Trade—prompted by the demand for commodities one could not produce for oneself—would, he thought, first create mutual dependency among diverse peoples from whence, this optimistic, indeed utopian, world-view held the conditions would emerge for the conversion of all non-Christians to Christianity, a precondition for Christ's return and the Endtime. The view is providential and millenarian.

These views came to have a place in England among in the Church of England identified as the anti-Calvinists, who themselves often are called "Arminians," who, following the moral theology of Erasmus and Chrysostom, stressed rational thought as the basis of human action, freedom of the will, and the human capacity for exercising goodwill in their social relations. Hakluyt, a clergyman and Canon of Westminster Abbey, was closely associated with this group. Using Hakluyt’s longstanding involvement in the promotion of exploration, navigation, trade, and settlement, to focus the discussion, the main aim of a paper is to draw out the theological and eschatological grounds on which rest his belief in the peace-making capacities of trade, contrasting his views with the positions taken by the so-called "Puritans" who drew on orthodox Calvinist doctrine for their view of human nature and the underpinnings of trade relations. (Show less)