The central issues in recent economic and historical research and debates on the emergence of a global economy are: How and when did the development of an economic world system start? What were the essential economic, social or cultural factors which contributed to the emergence of a world-encompassing commercial network? The book examines the expansion of commercial activities since the seventeenth century by analysing the various facets of commercial networking and their linkages at three different operational levels and for various countries and regions. The first part focuses on the emergence, decline and reconstruction of whole networks. The second part provides an actor-centered approach highlighting the role of actors, agencies and institutions in the networking process, while the third one explores the role of commercial cities as merger of global and local functions. The essays provide an innovative approach as they elaborate the interplay between different levels of the emerging world economy. The contributions to this book were originally delivered at a conference organized in Düsseldorf, 07-09 March 2002. The selected essays in this volume offer an international and interdisciplinary approach to the complex and multi-layered process of the expansion of the economic world system.

The Editors: Margrit Schulte Beerbühl, former research fellow at the German Historical Institute in London, lecturer in Social and Economic History and Modern History at the University of Düsseldorf. Currently working on a research project on Nationality and Commerce in eighteenth-century Britain. Jörg Vögele, Director of the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University of Düsseldorf. He has lectured Modern History, Economic History and Medical History at the Universities of Constance, Liverpool, Prague, and Düsseldorf. Currently working on research projects on European Port Cities in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and on the «Value of A Human Being» in Demographic Sciences in Germany, 19th-20th Centuries.