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pioneers in utilizing numerals to describe new maritime ‘worlds’, from which China is entirely absent. It features the known ocean currents and their physicality, while suggesting that comprehension of a system requires stories or pictures—basically a global model—as well. This chapter aims to understand how James Rennell’s 1832 study fits into the changing practices of scientific data acquisition at the turn of the eighteenth century and asks if this is related to establishing a hydrographical eurocentrism, and whether the serves as a material representation of this change.

Over the past quarter of a century, a new sub-discipline in academic history departments known as ‘world history’ has emerged at the edges of economic history and in tandem with the rise of the International Political Economy (IPE) subfield in political science. The point of overlap in the research agendas of world historians, economic history and IPE has opened up some of the strongest connections between the historical profession and other social science disciplines in many a year. A key element of the shared research agenda is the documentation of the timing, direction and volume of commodity flows of both raw materials and manufactured goods around the globe. The study of the early modern ‘consumer revolution’ is a for the rise of world history.

The history of Mexican cochineal over several centuries represents a key chapter in the origins of early modern globalization, both cultural and economic, since this dye was the most expensive in the world from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries as a result of the consistent demand for luxury textiles—dyed with bright crimson, scarlet or purple colours—by monarchs, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and aristocrats in Europe, as well as amongst the very wealthy almost everywhere. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on a series of elements which relate to the question of how some special commodities—in this case cochineal—produced in the early modern era by peasants in non-European regions came to play a major role in stimulating global trade and contributed to textile in other continents.

This chapter attempts to explain the role of social networks and political institutions in the diffusion of technology and scientific knowledge in the Spanish Empire during the early modern era. It does so by revisiting different stereotypes raised in the Spanish ‘Black Legend’ and the so-called intellectual and technological retardation of the country. It also sheds some light on the way informal and formal institutions favoured the transfer of technological knowledge to America and emphasizes the complexity of the relations between empires and globalization.

In this particular case study, a fiscal source had provide the information to study the effects of income distribution on consumption and demand in mid-eighteenth-century Madrid. As a result of centuries of relations between East and West, Madrid exhibits the dynamics of consumption of an imperial capital served by products from every corner of the world. Many of these overseas products played a central role as social markers, especially in urban populations. However, what we can infer from the data is the evidence of a well-defined stratified purchase where each social class underscores a particular pattern of consumption and a moderate spread of certain commodities among the .

The question of commodification and the creation of global markets is also a pedagogical one. In other words, the more that economic history is studied in detail and the more that knowledge of this history is integrated into a general understanding of global markets, the more students need to be brought into the discussion and informed of these developments. This chapter uses the case of university students in China to argue that better ways can be found to teach university students about the growth of global webs of commodity exchange. Specifically, the emerging field of ‘big history’ can provide a framework for placing these developments in a meaningful context. Using survey data from current Chinese students, this chapter shows why this is the case.