This paper analyses the role of Mompox in New Granada's interregional trade during the late colonial period. It focuses on the value, structure and destination of exports of domestic goods from Mompox to markets on the Atlantic and the Andes. By unearthing unexplored sources, this paper provides evidence that will help to understand, indirectly, some issues such as the nature and timing of economic growth, the degree of regional specialisation and, above all, the role of inland ports in the economic geography of the viceroyalty. The paper contends, first, that the region experienced a boom–bust cycle during the late colonial period. The export of domestic goods doubled between 1770 and 1800 but subsequently collapsed during the 1802-1809 years. Second, evidence suggests that the region experienced a process of market deepening and widening. Trade flows, then, played a larger role in shaping the economic history of the region than previously thought.

As the 2018 farm bill approaches, some important trends have emerged regarding the policy preferences of different commodity producers. While some farm organizations like the American Farm Bureau advocate for expanding free trade, other groups argue for more trade protections and even greater support from the federal government. This paper examines the global context that shapes such divergent policy positions. I argue that global demand has expanded for particular commodities (especially, feed grains and meat), leading producers of those commodities to push for free trade and weaker political regulations of agriculture. At the same time, however, greater liberalization over the past 25 years has contributed to greater competition for some commodities, such as wheat. Liberalization in the world economy has also contributed to greater market instability, especially in terms of prices and production. This instability and increased competition have pushed some commodity producers to favor national regulations and trade protections for agriculture. Focusing corn, soybeans and wheat, I argue that these three aspects of the global context—global demand, international competition and price instability—shape the policy preferences of US producers regarding the 2018 farm bill. I draw on statistics from the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Agriculture Organization to illustrate these aspects of the global context.

The United Kingdom remains one of the world's last industrialized nations not to have adopted the CISG. The UK CISG debate has endured for decades, with existing analysis largely focusing on competition, assessing the relative merits of the CISG and English law. This article's analysis is complementary; focusing instead on coherence, and the private international law implications of UK accession. This article assesses contractual interpretation, and commodity sales, within an overarching private international law framework. Recognizing the necessity of existing competitive analyses, it makes the case for UK CISG accession on the basis of its complementary coherency perspective.

This article responds directly to Brughmans and Poblome's (2016a) recent application of agent-based modelling to explore the relative integration of the Roman economy. The response will not only be of relevance to debates about the Roman economy, for it also asks critical questions about the use of formal modelling to interpret archaeological data. In posing open-ended questions rather than presenting definitive answers, it seeks to broaden and fuel discussion in a spirit of constructive critique.

Recent revisionist approaches to early pre-1500 eastern Indian Ocean history draw from and cross-reference epigraphic, archaeological, art historical, literary, cultural, textual, shipwreck, and a variety of other primary and secondary sources as these document the evolution of Southeast Asia from roughly 300 to 1500, before significant European regional presence became a factor. This study's focus is the transitional importance of c. 1000–1500 Indian Ocean international maritime trade and transit from the South Asian shorelines of the Bay of Bengal to the South China and Java Seas, which is conceived to have temporarily produced an inclusive eastern Indian Ocean zone of contact. In this then ‘borderless’ region there were a variety of meaningful contacts and material, cultural, and knowledge transfers that resulted in synthesis of Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian cultures and populations made possible by enhanced international maritime trade connections before European presence became a factor, a period often dated from the fall of Melaka to the Portuguese in 1511.

This article explains why historians of Latin America have been disinclined to engage with global history, and how global history has yet to successfully integrate Latin America into its debates. It analyses research patterns and identifies instances of parallel developments in the two fields, which have operated until recently in relative isolation from one another, shrouded and disconnected. It outlines a framework for engagement between Latin American history and global history, focusing particularly on the significant transformations of the understudied nineteenth century. It suggests that both global history and Latin American history will benefit from recognition of the existing work that has pioneered a path between the two, and from enhanced and sustained dialogue.

Adapting the dictum that ‘time is money’, Western merchants have long promoted and welcomed technologies to accelerate commerce. Thanks to revolutionary changes in communication in the nineteenth century, including the telegraph, information could for the first time travel much faster around the globe than goods. This asymmetric time–space compression created new problems for agents of global trade, as transactions could occur faster than the handling of the goods. Yet this problem also presented an opportunity to establish new forms of trading and ways of thinking about time. In the case of world markets for primary products such as grain or cotton, the new technique of futures trading at commodity exchanges became a tool to redress the time differential between the movement of goods and information. It pushed the commercial community to think in a ‘double time’ of a dematerialized present and a material future with physical goods, and centred global commodity markets on a few marketplaces. The article thus argues that historians need to examine economic understandings of the future alongside political, cultural, and social understandings.

Economic analyses of nature must somehow define the “environmental commodities” to which values are attached. We articulate principles to guide the choice and interpretation of nonmarket commodities. We describe how complex natural systems can be decomposed consistent with “ecological production theory,” which, like conventional production theory, distinguishes between biophysical inputs, process, and outputs. We argue that a systems approach to the decomposition and presentation of natural commodities can inform and possibly improve the validity of nonmarket environmental valuation studies. We raise concerns about interpretation, usefulness, and accuracy of benefit estimates derived without reference to ecological production theory.

Nonfarm investors might benefit from diversifying their portfolios by investing in the agricultural sector. Such diversifying investments could include investments in agricultural stocks or long-only futures positions through index funds. The papers in this session investigate the diversification potential of agricultural investments and discuss the effects of investments in index funds on agricultural markets.

Six wells at Tossal de les Basses in Spain captured a large assemblage of Iberian woodworking debris. The authors' analysis distinguishes a wide variety of boxes, handles, staves, pegs and joinery made in different and appropriate types of wood, some – like cypress – imported from some distance away. We have here a glimpse of a sophisticated and little known industry of the fourth century BC.

How do things come to embody meaning? In much anthropological and sociological writings, things have mainly been considered in two ways: either as commodities or as gifts. Correspondingly, people's relationships to things and to other people seem to fall in two broad categories, often regarded as mutually exclusive: either as impersonal, economic or market relationships with strangers, or as personal gift relationships with intimates, friends or relatives. The ‘social life of things’, however, is more varied. Drawing on Alan Page Fiske's theory of the four fundamental models of human relationship, four ways in which people may relate to each other and to things are distinguished; these models are applied to empirical data from a study on the giving of gifts in the Netherlands. Complications may occur when the parties to the transaction do not share the same frame of mind with respect to each other and to the things that are being transferred. Things may have conflicting social lives.

In the years prior to independence, farmers had access to the international market through the production of export crops which at that time received considerable input from research. Access to export crops has dwindled, support for research by national governments is disappointing, human resource development is inadequate, donor funding is uncoordinated, and the food crisis has taken on political dimensions. The assumption that direct importation of western technology can solve the problems of Africa is no longer valid in the face of several failures. The challenge to national agricultural research systems and the problems associated with the generation or adapting of farmer-oriented, location-specific technologies for sustaining agricultural production are discussed. Examples are drawn from India and an agenda for action, involving national governments, the international agricultural research centres and donors, in resolving these problems is presented.