Africa's Silk Road Broadman, Harry G; Isik, Gozde
2006, 11-02-2006, 2007
eBook, Book
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China and India's new-found interest in trade and investment with Africa - home to 300 million of the globe's poorest people and the world's most formidable development challenge - presents a ...significant opportunity for growth and integration of the Sub-Saharan continent into the global economy. Africa's Silk Road finds that China and India's South-South commerce with Africa is about far more than natural resources, opening the way for Africa to become a processor of commodities and a competitive supplier of goods and services to these countries - a major departure from its long established relations with the North. A growing number of Chinese and Indian businesses active in Africa operate on a global scale, work with world-class technologies, produce products and services according to the most demanding standards, and foster the integration of African businesses into advanced markets. There are significant imbalances, however, in these emerging commercial relationships. These can be addressed through a series of reforms in all countries:"At-the-border" reforms, such as elimination of China and India's escalating tariffs on Africa's leading exports, and elimination of Africa's tariffs on certain inputs that make exports uncompetitive "Behind-the-border" reforms in Africa, to unleash competitive market forces and strengthen its basic market institutions "Between-the-border" improvements in trade facilitation mechanisms to decrease transactions costs Reforms that leverage linkages between investment and trade, to allow African businesses to participate in global production networks that investments by Chinese and Indian firms can generate.
Cities of Commercedevelops a model of institutional change in European commerce based on urban rivalry. Cities continuously competed with each other by adapting commercial, legal, and financial ...institutions to the evolving needs of merchants. Oscar Gelderblom traces the successive rise of Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to commercial primacy between 1250 and 1650, showing how dominant cities feared being displaced by challengers while lesser cities sought to keep up by cultivating policies favorable to trade. He argues that it was this competitive urban network that promoted open-access institutions in the Low Countries, and emphasizes the central role played by the urban power holders--the magistrates--in fostering these inclusive institutional arrangements. Gelderblom describes how the city fathers resisted the predatory or reckless actions of their territorial rulers, and how their nonrestrictive approach to commercial life succeeded in attracting merchants from all over Europe.
Cities of Commerceintervenes in an important debate on the growth of trade in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Challenging influential theories that attribute this commercial expansion to the political strength of merchants, this book demonstrates how urban rivalry fostered the creation of open-access institutions in international trade.
In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American ...Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws.
Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart ofZamumo's Giftshighlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.
The most arresting aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment is its conception of commercial society as a distinct and distinctive social formation. Christopher Berry explains why Enlightenment thinkers ...considered commercial society to be wealthier and freer than earlier forms, and charts the contemporary debates and tensions between Enlightenment thinkers that this idea raised. The book analyses the full range of literature on the subject, from key works like Adam Smith's ‘Wealth of Nations’, David Hume's ‘Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects’ and Adam Ferguson's ‘Essay on the History of Civil Society’ to lesser-known works such as Robert Wallace’s ‘Dissertation on Numbers of Mankind’.
The Chinese and U.S. economies have been locked in an uncomfortable embrace since the late 1970s. Although the relationship initially arose out of mutual benefits, in recent years it has taken on the ...trappings of an unstable codependence, with the two largest economies in the world losing their sense of self, increasing the risk of their turning on one another in a destructive fashion.InUnbalanced: The Codependency of America and ChinaStephen Roach, senior fellow at Yale University and former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, lays bare the pitfalls of the current China-U.S. economic relationship. He highlights the conflicts at the center of current tensions, including disputes over trade policies and intellectual property rights, sharp contrasts in leadership styles, the role of the Internet, the recent dispute over cyberhacking, and more.A firsthand witness to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Roach likely knows more about the U.S.-China economic relationship than any other Westerner. Here he discusses:
Why America saving too little and China saving too much creates mounting problems for bothHow China is planning to re-boot its economic growth model by moving from an external export-led model to one of internal consumerism with a new focus on service industriesHow America, shows a disturbing lack of strategy, preferring a short-term reactive approach over a more coherent Chinese-style planning frameworkThe way out: what America could do to turn its own economic fate around and position itself for a healthy economic and political relationship with China
In the wake of the 2008 crisis, both unbalanced economies face urgent and mutually beneficial rebalancings.Unbalancedconcludes with a recipe for resolving the escalating tensions of codependence. Roach argues that the Next China offers much for the Next America-and vice versa.
Drawing on a rich trove of documents, including correspondence not seen for 300 years, this study explores the emergence and growth of a remarkable global trade network operated by Armenian silk ...merchants from a small outpost in the Persian Empire. Based in New Julfa, Isfahan, in what is now Iran, these merchants operated a network of commercial settlements that stretched from London and Amsterdam to Manila and Acapulco. The New Julfan Armenians were the only Eurasian community that was able to operate simultaneously and successfully in all the major empires of the early modern world—both land-based Asian empires and the emerging sea-borne empires—astonishingly without the benefits of an imperial network and state that accompanied and facilitated European mercantile expansion during the same period. This book brings to light for the first time the trans-imperial cosmopolitan world of the New Julfans. Among other topics, it explores the effects of long distance trade on the organization of community life, the ethos of trust and cooperation that existed among merchants, and the importance of information networks and communication in the operation of early modern mercantile communities.
