Introduction: Silks, a Global Perspective

This book focuses on the development of silk and silk-related industries during the sixteenth-twentieth centuries, a laps of time which makes it possible to take long-term movements and global dynamics into account. In overstepping the frontiers between pre-modern and modern times, it takes various connected perspectives as vantage points: skills, technologies, and knowledge; organization of production and gender; trade, market and institutions, all of which contribute to renewing a major topic in global economic history