• 1. Introduction: cotton textiles and global history
• Part I. The First Cotton Revolution - A Centrifugal System, c.1000-1500: 2. Selling to the world: India and the old cotton system
• 3. 'Wool growing on wild trees' - the global reach of cotton
• 4. The world's best - cotton manufacturing and the advantage of India
• Part II. Learning and Connecting - Making Cottons Global, c.1500-1750: 5. The Indian apprenticeship - Europeans trading in Indian cottons
• 6. New consuming habits - how cotton entered European houses and wardrobes
• 7. From Asia to America - cottons in the Atlantic world
• 8. Learning and substituting - printing textiles in Europe
• Part III. The Second Cotton Revolution - A Centripetal System, c.1750-2000: 9. Cotton, slavery and plantations in the New World
• 10. Competing with India - cotton and European industrialisation
• 11. 'The wolf in sheep's clothing' - the potential of cotton
• 12. Global outcomes - the West and the new cotton system
• 13. Conclusion - from system to system, from divergence to convergence.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalised economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialisation of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire switched from world producers to buyers of European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for over two hundred years. This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Prologue
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Looking at the Self
• 3. The Look of Religion
• 4. Nationhood
• 5. Looking at Others
• 6. Clothes and Consumers
• 7. Bourgeios Taste and Emotional Styles
• 8. Epilogue: An Old Regime of Dress?
• Acknowledgements
• Select Bibiliography.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Dressing Up shows why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. It imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people's appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves. Using an astonishing array of sources, Ulinka Rublack argues that an appreciation of people's relationship to appearances and images is essential to an understanding of what it meant to live at this time - and ever since. We read about the head accountant of a sixteenth-century merchant firm who commissioned 136 images of himself elaborately dressed across a lifetime; students arguing with their mother about which clothes they could have; or Nuremberg women wearing false braids dyed red or green. This brilliantly illustrated book draws on a range of insights across the disciplines and allows us to see an entire period in new ways. In integrating its findings into larger arguments about consumption, visual culture, the Reformation, German history, and the relationship of European and global history, it promises to re-shape the field.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Spices and medieval cuisine
• Medicine : spices as drugs
• The odors of paradise
• Trade and prices
• Scarcity, abundance, and profit
• "That damned pepper" : spices and moral danger
• Searching for the realms of spices
• Finding the realms of spices : Portugal and Spain.

The demand for spices in medieval Europe was extravagant and was reflected in the pursuit of fashion, the formation of taste, and the growth of luxury trade. It inspired geographical and commercial exploration as traders pursued such common spices as pepper and cinnamon, and rarer aromatic products including ambergris and musk. Ultimately, the spice quest led to imperial missions that were to change world history.This engaging book explores the demand for spices: why were they so popular, and why so expensive? Paul Freedman surveys the history, geography, economics, and culinary tastes of the Middle Ages to uncover the surprisingly varied ways that spices were put to use - in elaborate medieval cuisine, in the treatment of disease, for the promotion of well-being, and to perfume important ceremonies of the Church. Spices became symbols of beauty, affluence, taste, and grace, Freedman shows, and their expense and fragrance drove the engines of commerce and conquest at the dawn of the modern era.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Experiencing the sacred and the social
• Encountering novelties
• Adapting under colonialism
• Going native
• Learning from Indians
• Enduring idolatry
• Commodifying across the Atlantic
• Consuming rituals
• Monopolizing vice
• Enchanting the profane
• Epilogue: Globalization, gateways, and transformations.

• Prologue: the color of desire
• 1. dyer's lot
• 2. Color of the sun
• 3. Ancient art
• 4. Emperor's new dye
• 5. Profitable empire
• 6. Cochineal on trial
• 7. Legacies
• 8. Trade secrets
• 9. Pirates' prize
• 10. Wormberry
• 11. Through the looking glass
• 12. Curious gamble
• 13. Spy in Oaxaca
• 14. Anderson's incredible folly
• 15. Red and revolution
• 16. Scarlet fever
• 17. Lump of coal
• 18. Renaissance dye
• Epilogue : cheap color.

This book recounts the colorful history of cochineal, a legendary red dye that was once one of the world's most precious commodities. Treasured by the ancient Mexicans, cochineal was sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519. Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain's cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune. Desperate to find their own sources of the elusive dye, the other Europeans tried to crack the enigma of cochineal. Did it come from a worm, a berry, a seed? Could it be stolen from Mexico and transplanted to their own colonies? Pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies--all joined the chase for cochineal, a chase that lasted more than three centuries.--From publisher description.

• IllustrationsPrefaceThe Great Coffee ControversyThe Coming of Coffee to the Near EastCoffee, Coffeehouses, and the OppositionWine, Coffee, and the Holy LawLethargy, Leprosy, and Melancholia: Coffee and Medieval MedicineTaverns without Wine: The Rise of the CoffeehouseSociety and the Social Life of the CoffeehouseThe Coffeehouse: Social Norms, Social SymbolsAppendix: Note on SourcesGlossaryNotesBibliographyIndex.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Drawing on the accounts of early European travelers, original Arabic sources on jurisprudence and etiquette, and treatises on coffee from the period, the author recounts the colorful early history of the spread of coffee and the influence of coffeehouses in the medieval Near East. Detailed descriptions of the design, atmosphere, management, and patrons of early coffeehouses make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of coffee and the unique institution of the coffeehouse in urban Muslim society.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)