Bücher der Reihe Europe's Asian Centuries

It asks why people valued gems, how they determined the value of a given gem, and how the value of a gem was connected to its perceived place of origin.

Goods from the East focuses on the fine product trade's first Global Age: how products were made, marketed and distributed between Asia and Europe between 1600 and 1800. It brings together established scholars as well as new, to provide a full comparative and connective study of this trade.

Imported from India, China, the Levant, and Persia and appreciated for their diversity, designs, fast bright colours and fine weave, Asian textiles became so popular in France that in 1686 the state banned their import, consumption and imitation.

This book links the trade of the Danish and Swedish East India companies to the British taste for tea, a Scandinavian craving for colourful Chinese silk textiles, import substitutions schemes and natural history in the eighteenth century.