Trading Empires and trade routes
Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai
I will admit that I approached historian James Carter’s book Champion’s Day: The End of Old Shanghai with seriously mixed feelings. On the one hand, I spent some time last year reading about the International Settlement in Shanghai in the 1930s while I was working on a piece on self-styled “girl reporter” Peggy Hull I…
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The Enemy of All Mankind
Several years ago, I read Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. I never reviewed it here on the Margins, though a large sticky note on the inside cover listing a number of thought-provoking questions suggests that I intended to.* As…
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Road Trip Through History, Nuremberg, Pt. 3: Merchant Houses
My Own True Love and I spent three afternoons touring museums in three merchant houses from slightly different periods: the Albrecht Dürer house from the early sixteenth century,(1) the Tucher house from the mid-16h century and the Stadtmuseum in the Fembo house, which dates from the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Together they tell…
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