The Mercantile Effect: On Art ad Exchange in the Islamicate World During 17th-18th Centuries

Call for Papers

Sponsored by the Gingko Library

November 18-19, 2016

Istanbul, Turkey

The Courtauld Institute of Art − Pera Museum − Gingko Library Conference

From Agra to Aleppo, Bandar Abbas to Marseilles, Cairo to Canton, Goa to Zanzibar; peoples as diverse as Armenians, Chinese, Arabs, Persians and Europeans, traversed long distances along land and maritime trade routes moving art things and their attendant ideas, ideals, and technologies. The development of mercantile networks and global trade routes in the early modern period relied on the emergence of new institutional and cultural methods of exchange. The formulation of diverse collective ventures was organized through the Dutch, English and French East India companies and additionally by the establishment of a colonial presence in the New World by the Dutch and Portuguese, ensuring a territorial sphere of power and increased influence through trade. Material culture - including building ideas - connected aspirations towards prestigious foreign and exotic objects, new luxuries in manufactured textiles, inlaid metalwork, paper products, glazed ceramic and painted porcelain vessels.

Submisson deadline February 5, 2016.  For more information click here.