Global Commodities: The Material Cutlure of Early Modern Connections, 1400-1800

Material culture created and was created by connections with 'others' in the era before the global exchange of people, political ideas and economic processes intensified through industrialization. Material culture and exchange played a central role in forging enduring and transformative global connections. This network aims to take these bold assertions, and test their validity by exploring the material culture of early modern connections. It asks how our understanding of early modern global connections changes if we take seriously the role that material culture played within them. It does this by bringing together scholars with expertise across a range of disciplines and geographic areas that came into direct contact in the early modern period (c. 1400-1800). This project's innovative approach challenges existing notions of divergence and difference between cultural areas by focusing instead on the connections and integrations established across different early modern cultural, economic and social spaces.

This network has two areas of impact:
1. To aid museums to present new global narratives of material development for the wider public, addressing in particular historical issues of inter-cultural and inter-religious connections.
2. To create awareness among design practitioners and the wider design community of the historical dimension of global material culture, especially in the context of the everyday.