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Purpose: Driven by the evidence from the literature on the significance of mobile (m-)payment in economic growth and productivity and at the same time the relative dismal adoption of this service, the purpose of present paper is to elucidate the merchants' m-payment adoption from the perspective of trust, drawing upon the game theory framework, in the Malaysian context. Design/methodology/approach: An online survey consisting of 302 respondents was carried out to investigate the impact of trust and opportunism on merchants' perceived trustworthiness using a two-staged structural equation modeling–neural network approach to determine the significance and relative importance of variables. This study also applies a game-theoretic approach to analyze the impact of trust on the relationship between merchants and m-payment service providers. Findings: The results indicate a positive and statistically significant relationship between merchant trust, merchant opportunism and perceived trustworthiness, and a statistically significant negative relationship was found between m-payment provider opportunism and perceived trustworthiness. The findings from the prisoner's dilemma two-player model indicate that the scenarios of mutual trust and mutual opportunism as paradigmatic of cooperation and defection produce the best and worse outcomes, respectively. An intriguing result was the positive impact of merchant opportunism on perceived trustworthiness, which indicates a very calculative orientation of merchants in m-payment contracting. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is among the first attempts to propose a game theory approach to the interaction between merchants and m-payment providers under the framework of trust and opportunism. A game theory study in the context of m-payment adoption can contribute to the theoretical literature by providing insights into the decision-making processes of merchants. By incorporating trust and opportunism into the game theory model, we can gain a better understanding of how they affect the decision-making process and overall adoption rates. The conclusions and implications provide useful insights for managers of both m-payment platforms and merchants in this relational exchange. The results of the present research can provide insights into the factors that influence merchant decisions and guide them toward suitable partnerships for successful adoption and can guide authorities for policy interventions and supporting adoption efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the implications of organizational control on the race for technological leadership in merchant empires. I provide an illustrative framework in which poor organizations have reduced incentives to invest, which in turn stifle technology improvements making leaders lag new entrants. In the late sixteenth century, Portugal's large ships carried more merchandise and were more fitting of the monarch's grandiose preferences, but they also were more prone to disaster. The merchant-controlled Dutch East India Company however, invested in smaller but more seaworthy vessels conducting more voyages at a much lower loss rate. The surviving historical evidence shows Portugal relying on large ships well into the seventeenth century suggesting her technological edge was gone by the time the Dutch dominated the Indian Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the arrest of American sea captain George Washington Eayrs in Spanish California in the 1810s, revealing insights into the complex geopolitical and commercial relationships across the Pacific Ocean. It discusses how the War of 1812 altered trading patterns, leading American merchants like Eayrs to engage more in the eastern Pacific, resulting in his arrest. Additionally, it highlights broader transpacific developments and the Mexican Revolution.

This essay explores the role of quarantine stations as sites of creation and disruption of Mediterranean borderlands. It considers the early history of the "new lazaretto," the maritime quarantine station created in Ancona, a city in the Papal States, after Pope Clement XII declared the city a free port in 1732. Big and beautiful, the new lazaretto was built on an artificial island and marked Ancona's cityscape. This essay reconstructs how it functioned as a dynamic border space where concerns about disease transmission were addressed through the deployment of practices of environmental and sensory control. It argues that the new lazaretto embodied a liminal environment that was established at the crossroads of medical, economic, religious, and political entanglements and reflected the geopolitical dynamics of the eastern Mediterranean world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the publication of an unknown decree of Nādir Šāh issued in December 1742/January 1743 at the request of the Armenian merchants of Agulis. It examines the taxes levied from the merchants and the ways of tax extortion and excesses committed by Nādir Šāh's administration in that period. The article contains a short review of the historical background of the document, the economic situation in the Nādir Šāh's empire including Agulis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"American Slavers: Merchants, Mariners, and the Transatlantic Commerce in Captives, 1644-1865" by Sean M. Kelley explores the often overlooked role of Americans in the transatlantic slave trade. Kelley argues that while Americans may not have been the primary builders or owners of slave ships, they played crucial roles in the passage of over two thousand ships that transported more than three hundred thousand Africans to the Western Hemisphere. The book traces the development of American involvement in the slave trade from its early, irregular and small-scale beginnings in the 17th century to its expansion in the 18th century, particularly in Rhode Island. Kelley also examines the ambivalence and fluctuations in American involvement in the trade after the American Revolution, as well as the illegal trade that continued until the 1860s. The book highlights the significant impact of American slavers on the social and economic development of West Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. [Extracted from the article]

This article argues that even as the legal dispute over the Ram Janmabhumi site remained unresolved for decades, an unimpeded surge in Marwari mercantile financing of new temples for Hanumān, Rāma's most celebrated devotee, provided the material foundation for a nationwide space exalting Rāma through the worship of Hanumān. Living in the pan-Indian urban diaspora and tracing descent to Rajasthan, Marwari merchants coalesced into devotional organizations dedicated to Hanumān and allied Vaiṣṇava deities (such as Rāma and Kṛṣṇa), initially centered on shrines in Rajasthan itself, from the 1980s on – coeval with the Ram Janmabhumi movement's escalation. Marwaris had long been known as philanthropists for various social causes, but this article suggests that their philanthropy had evolved by the 1990s. Since the destruction of the Babri mosque at that time, Marwaris funded numerous new temples for Hanumān, in which Rāma was of course also revered. Some Marwaris assumed advisory roles in Hindu activist groups, seemingly embracing a commitment to restore canonical Hindu values eroded by centuries of foreign rule and modern caste politics. This article thus looks at Marwari patronage of deities' temples as anticipating a post-2019 Ayodhya verdict Hindu devotional geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fujian has been one of the most important tea-producing provinces in China since ancient times, and Fujian Tea occupied an important position in modern China's foreign trade. In the 1930s, the prosperous Fujian Tea experienced a compre hensive decline, which was reflected in tea farmers' switching to other jobs, deserted tea plantations, market shrinkage, and it also fell into unprecedented financial difficulties. In order to revitalize the tea industry in Fujian Province, the Fujian Provincial Government began to provide low-interest loans to tea farmers and merchants on the eve of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, and gradually established a distribution mechanism in which the united tea company and rural cooperatives were the main recipients of the loans. To a certain extent, the Fujian Tea Loan improved the difficult situation of tea farmers and merchants, promoted the revival of the tea industry, and strongly supported the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. However, due to various drawbacks such as delays in distribution and misappropriation in the loan issuance process, it ultimately failed to reverse the decline of Fujian Tea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Priced oblivious transfer (POT) is a cryptographic protocol designed for privacy-preserving e-commerce of digital content. It involves two parties: the merchant, who provides a set of priced items as input, and a customer, who acquires one of them. After the protocol has run, the customer obtains the item they chose, while the merchant cannot determine which one. Moreover, the protocol guarantees that the customer gets the content only if they have paid the price established by the merchant. In a recent paper, the authors proposed a POT system where the payments employed e-coin transactions. The strong point of the proposal was the absence of zero-knowledge proofs required in preceding systems to guarantee the correctness of payments. In this paper, we propose a novel e-coin-based POT system with a fast item retrieval procedure whose running time does not depend on the number of items for sale. This is an improvement over the aforementioned existing proposal whose execution time becomes prohibitively long when the catalog is extensive. The use of zero-knowledge proofs is neither required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subsidy rolls of the 1540s and 1560s from the collection of Thomas Gregory, Coventry city clerk from 1528 to 1570, provide relative comparisons among Coventry's wards over time. The various wards remained fairly consistent in relative wealth during the sixteenth century, and despite more diverse markets in the latter part of the century textiles still remained important. The central wards were the wealthiest, and wealth decreased moving towards the suburbs. The outer wards and suburbs were not necessarily poor, they just held few of the wealthiest merchants. The suburban wards of Spon and Gosford benefited from the growth of cap making. The incredibly wealthy wool and cloth merchants disappear by the mid-sixteenth century, but there is clear retention of the class of moderately wealthy gentry and merchants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the popularization of E-payment, more and more electronic payment protocols have been proposed. In 2021, Lin et al. proposed a trusted third-party E-Payment protocol based on a set of three-particle local indistinguishable orthogonal product (X-LIOP) states. In this paper, we first point out that there is a security flaw where the merchant can forge the purchase goods information to sell something that the customer does not want to buy in Lin et al. protocol. Besides, the X-LIOP states used by Lin are not orthogonal and can be discriminated by Local Operation and Classical Communication (LOCC). Second, we propose a new electronic payment protocol that combines group signature and the three-particle X-LIOP states. Compared with Lin et al. protocol, customers can purchase goods anonymously in our protocol and the unforgeability of messages and signatures is guaranteed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the implications of organizational control on the race for technological leadership in merchant empires. I provide an illustrative framework in which poor organizations have reduced incentives to invest, which in turn stifle technology improvements making leaders lag new entrants. In the late sixteenth century, Portugal's large ships carried more merchandise and were more fitting of the monarch's grandiose preferences, but they also were more prone to disaster. The merchant-controlled Dutch East India Company however, invested in smaller but more seaworthy vessels conducting more voyages at a much lower loss rate. The surviving historical evidence shows Portugal relying on large ships well into the seventeenth century suggesting her technological edge was gone by the time the Dutch dominated the Indian Ocean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes that the final simile in the poem "The Scholarly-Gypsy" by Matthew Arnold referred to English poet Alfred Tennyson. Topics discussed include medical metaphor in the poem as criticism of Tennyson's elegy "In Memoriam," intellectual curiosity of the scholarly-gypsy versus Tennyson's intellectual throne, Arnold's diagnosis of modern life disease and parody of the content of "In Memoriam," references to merchants' bales in both poems, and epic heroism of the scholarly-gypsy.

In 1583, the Candia galleys captured Diego Brochero, corsair of the Order of Malta. Transferred to Venice, his captivity would soon become a top-level diplomatic conflict, involving actors such as the King of Spain, the Turkish sultan, the Pope or the famous merchant Simón Ruiz who, precisely, kept correspondence with unpublished information in his archive about the captivity of his relative. In this article we propose an analysis of the background, development and consequences of this event, of the diplomatic conflict triggered by it and of its relevance when shaping the personality of the corsair, which sheds more light on the character's biography and its impact on Mediterranean diplomatic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of sweet cane cultivation in the Canary Islands marked the first economic focus to which the islands were linked during the 15th and 16th centuries. Among them were the estates and mills on the island of La Palma, operational from the early 1500s. Therefore, this study analyzes the export trade of sugar from La Palma during the central decades of the 16th century, using documentation from the notarial protocols of La Palma and Seville. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research discusses the strange relationship between Antonio and Bassanio, as well as the merchant's relationship with Shylock. Their relationship is represented as homoerotic, and Antonio's desire for an inexplicable sacrifice for Bassanio suggests aspects of Antonio's interiority. Shylock is also represented as the play's overriding father, and this detail suggests the cause of Antonio's sadness at the beginning of the play. The concept of interiority is discussed by Maus (1995) as a social and cultural construct of the English Renaissance. She analyses interiority based on the opposition between appearances, considered false and misleading at the time, and interiority, which was seen as sincere and true manifestations of the inner dimensions of the individual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study delves into the rapidly evolving community group-buying model, specifically focusing on the determination of optimal group-buying thresholds and pricing strategies for merchants. Aiming to bridge the gap in the existing literature, the methodology employs optimization models, integrating a numerical analysis to construct and evaluate a single merchant model. The findings reveal a nuanced relationship: within a specific threshold interval, a unique group-purchase threshold exists where merchants can maximize profits by balancing group and ordinary sales. The study shows that factors like ordinary selling price, group-buying publicity, and associated costs significantly influence these thresholds and pricing strategies. A critical insight is the threshold's variability in response to market conditions, highlighting a strategic balance for maximizing profitability. The research underscores the need for merchants to adapt their strategies in response to evolving market dynamics and consumer behaviors. However, the study acknowledges its limitations due to its theoretical nature and focus on the Chinese market, suggesting the potential for future empirical studies in diverse cultural and economic contexts. Overall, this research contributes both theoretically and practically by providing a foundational framework for merchants to optimize group-purchase thresholds and pricing strategies in the dynamic realm of community group buying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extant literature on mobile financial services indicates that the work on merchants' adoption of mobile wallets is sporadic and under-researched. Taking into account the critical role of merchants in the mobile payment ecosystem, this study intends to study the factors that impact merchants' intention to adopt mobile wallets. A comprehensive model combining the UTAUT model, TTF model, perceived trust, and price value was empirically tested using the PLS-SEM approach. The data was collected from 236 merchants in New Delhi, India. Among all the variables that are significant in impacting behavioral intention to use mobile wallets, the task-technology fit is the most important factor, followed by price value, perceived trust, performance expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. Also, significant positive relationships were found between technology characteristics and task-technology fit, and task characteristics and task-technology fit. This study is an early attempt to elucidate merchants' perspectives toward mobile wallets in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a book about Hernando Colón's library and his book collection. The book provides information about the books he inherited, the books he purchased, and his interest in small ephemeral publications. It also explores the connections between merchants and the New World, Colón's efforts in cartography, and the organization of his library. The article mentions the detailed instructions Colón provided for accessing his library after his death and describes the disputes and depredations that occurred after his passing. The book is described as popularizing literature but lacking clarity. [Extracted from the article]

This article aims to supplement existing economic analyses of the Marwari mercantile network by exploring how the network is both grounded spatially and reproduced culturally in Manipur. It discusses some of the economic and socio-cultural practices adopted by the Marwari merchants in Manipur including their business activities, marriage patterns and temple construction. In so doing, it highlights the nature of relationships between these practices and how they are connected to their mercantile network at large. The article also illustrates how merchant communities such as the Marwaris carve out their own space through cultural processes of place-making in a contested place like Manipur. Elucidating how the Marwari mercantile network gets reproduced culturally, it reveals the ways in which networks of capital relate to distinct spatial configurations – in this case, borderland. In turn, the above process also delineates how the idea of belonging for the Marwari merchants is emplaced and shaped at the same time by their mercantile network. Based primarily on interviews, observation and some documents, the materials used in this article stem mainly from Imphal and some from Churachandpur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2017, archaeologists from the State Service for Culture and Monuments in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania, Germany, excavated the remains of a clinker-built cargo vessel in the seaport of Wismar, one of three medieval shipwrecks found during the extension of the port. With riveted outer planking and the presence of bitis, the wreck can be placed in the Nordic clinker shipbuilding tradition. It was built from oak and pine sourced from western Sweden in the period AD 1184-90. The construction shows striking similarities with a number of large 12th-century AD cargo vessels found in northern Germany and Scandinavia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving services to merchants in traditional markets is one solution where competition and the number of modern stores are growing. The application of BLUD in traditional market management is a creation in overcoming competition. With the BLUD system, it will make the relevant regional apparatus work unit (SKPD) more flexible in managing the market, both traders and the budget generated from the merchant levy for market progress. Representative data is needed to determine the feasibility of establishing the Ngawi Large Market Market BLUD in Ngawi District, Ngawi Regency. The purpose of this study is the identification of the fulfillment of substantive, technical and administrative requirements in the establishment of BLUD in Pasar Besar Ngawi in Ngawi District, Ngawi Regency. This type of research is descriptive research using a quantitative approach. Data collection was carried out using multiple sources of evidence, namely questionnaires, interviews, documentation and direct observation. Data analysis techniques use quantitative descriptives with substantive, technical, and administrative criteria. The results of the study found that the Ngawi Large Market in Ngawi District, Ngawi Regency has not met the two criteria of substantive requirements, has met the criteria of technical requirements, and has not met the eight criteria of administrative requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When combined with the potential benefits to individuals and families which Company service represented, it is clear that the impetus for retaining positions in the Company's hierarchy were predicated on personal advancement which was largely unattainable for members of religious and ethnic outgroups within Persian and Yemeni society. In any case, both positions were essential to the smooth running of the Company's business and those who held each role enjoyed numerous privileges and perquisites associated with it, making Company employment both relatively secure and also highly lucrative. When one adds to this the legal protection the Company was able to extend over its non-European employees and their families through its Farman, Company employment in Safavid Persia appears yet more attractive. The co-opting of Armenian and Banian financial expertise in both Persia and Mocha was not linked to familial or personal connections to Company merchants, nor to agreements made on behalf of particular families. [Extracted from the article]

The tablets in the private archives of the Assyrian merchants unearthed at the Kültepe provide detailed information about their economic and social lives. Information about the period's business transactions through these tablets is also obtained. The three documents discussed here belong to the archive of Aššur-rē'ī and his son Pilah-İštar, which were found in the 1988 Kültepe excavation and are about applying for a guarantor. These documents, which have a specific pattern and are prepared in the presence of witnesses, are a kind of summons. If the debtor does not make the payment on time, the creditor applies to the guarantor, and this application is recorded. In this study, besides the examination of these three new tablets, information about the guarantee and "to give to a guarantor (ana ša qātātim tadānu)" in the Kültepe texts and the 1988 archive are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a detailed study of a heretofore largely ignored and extraordinary notebook written by an Armenian merchant, tailor, and late-seventeenth-century artist named Gabriel stored at the Austrian National Library (Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek). Part sketchbook with beautiful illuminations of religious and other landmarks and part chronicle, this notebook destabilizes clear-cut distinctions between travel diary, first-person narrative, chronicle, and a work of "nouveau literacy" in Islamicate Eurasia. This essay probes the multilayered contents of Gabriel's notebook and on the basis of an archival reconstruction of the author's microhistory, it places the author at the center of a complex underground spy ring involved in the 1687 Habsburg reconquest of the Ottoman fortified city of Buda in Hungary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review of: The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire, Joseph Sassoon (2022) New York: Pantheon Books, 412 pp., ISBN 978-0-59331-659-7, h/bk, $35.00 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Bronze Age Mediterranean, trade was a key mechanism that defined the era's political, social, and economic dynamism. This paper reviews recent methodological and empirical developments in the study of trade in the Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, with a focus on the Late Bronze Age. The complexity of the relevant evidence presents nontrivial interpretative challenges, and a variety of schools of thought concerning the methods and approaches best suited for enlightening economic exchange through the study of archaeological remains co-exist. New insights based on empirical study of archaeological evidence have primarily coalesced around topics that have long been central to the study of trade, especially the sources and destinations of metal resources and the distribution of ceramic containers and their contents. Developing areas of emphasis, such as the roles of merchants and traders, have simultaneously emerged. Both novel methods and recent empirical insights highlight the difficulty inherent in attempts to relate artifacts to commercial exchange due to the variety of human and material mobilities apparent in the archaeological record. The path forward for understanding Bronze Age trade economies will require carefully tailoring research questions that may be answered in concrete ways with the evidence available and developing interpretative frameworks that can accommodate both bottom-up views emphasizing individual agency and generalizing models that facilitate comparison through space and time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All the European missionaries, merchants, and travelers to China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were men. In their books introducing Chinese knowledge, they created idealized images of modest and courteous Chinese women, and idealized them as models for European women to emulate. However, this scrutiny from a perspective of exotic otherness did not reflect the real lives and inner worlds of Chinese women but instead reflected European value judgements. Contemporary chinoiserie art was mainly utilized to embellish women's spaces with representations of carefree and romantic Chinese women. This research analyses the peculiarities of images of Chinese women as portrayed in male European observers' books, and locates the distinctions between, and sources of, these images in diverse gender settings throughout Europe, thus analysing Europe's historical perception of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent Restoration Ecology article by Merchant et al. (2022) suggested that practitioners do not regularly use functional traits in restoration planning. We disagree and provide our collective experience that practitioners do leverage trait‐based approaches and information, but in ways that are different from researchers. Here, we provide an expanded perspective that incorporates practitioner voices to provide a more complete assessment of how traits are used in restoration practice. We highlight that a major challenge in the field of restoration ecology that leads to a disconnect between researchers and practitioners is a different set of knowledge systems, goals, incentives, and limitations. We provide approaches that researchers can use to connect with practitioners and leverage their knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improvements in shipping productivity, resulting from increased maritime safety, are considered essential factors to explain commercial growth in long-distance trade between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. However, this article points out that for more than a century, the routes between Portugal and the ports of Brazil were unsafe. The fleet system was the solution found to overcome pirates and privateers. This transport system created a series of problems, though. This article shows how weather conditions, infrastructure problems regarding port facilities, the distances from the port of Recife to sugar mills, and disagreements between shippers, merchants, and sugar mill owners hampered shipping and how they had some negative implications for traders. The fleets generated stocks of sugar in the colony and lengthened the payback period on investments made by merchants in Portugal. These problems disappeared with the end of the fleet system in 1762/1766. Still, others emerged, such as the regulation of freight rates in 1751 and 1766, the decline in shipping productivity throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, and the wars from the 1790s onwards. I argue that shipping in the Portuguese Atlantic was constantly hampered but that this did not prevent commercial growth from occurring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the possibilities and limits of urban constitutionalism and its relation to the rule of law for fifteenth century Bruges. Late medieval Bruges was a city of great prominence where several important trade flows came together. Providing adequate justice was a top priority for the aldermen. Scholars have traditionally stressed the importance of privileges in providing this security. Privileges granted a theoretical protection but also entailed other deviations from the general rule. The grant of privileges lay the foundation of an unequal treatment of merchants. This article argues that, though these privileges were essential in protecting merchants, the aldermen of Bruges did not grant far-reaching procedural advantages to merchant communities. In doing so, the aldermen of Bruges ensured that certain basic notions, such as access to the aldermen of Bruges, equal opportunities before this court and the prevalence of Flemish law over foreign law, were present. In the city's belief that proper justice equalled the common good, some embryonic notions of the rule of law become apparent. However, we should not overextend this argument. The city depended on these merchant communities. Therefore, the city was more susceptible to the leverage of the merchant communities, than, for example, the state. Bruges refused demands for procedural advantages for the most part of the fifteenth century, but once the presence of these communities became indispensable, the city had to give in and alter its legal framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the history of eighteenth-century St. Petersburg coastal shipping in the context of the Early Modern European coastal transportation growth. Based on the sources significantly understudied so far, I discuss the spatial and economic aspects of St. Petersburg coastal transportation. Using the conceptual framework of the littoral society and Greater St. Petersburg, I discuss the uncertainty of the very concept of the St. Petersburg coastal fleet. Based on the detailed account of the St. Petersburg coastal fleet prepared in the late eighteenth century, I reveal the commercial strategies used by the St. Petersburg merchants in their competition with their European counterparts. These observations confirm that St. Petersburg became a focal point of an enormous network of water transportation, and the local merchants used the coastal fleet as an efficient instrument of participation in international maritime commerce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Dal Mar Nero al delta del Nilo: I Pisani e i loro commerci nel Levante (secoli XIII-XIV)" by Bruno Figliuolo explores the commercial activities of Pisans in the Levant from the 13th to the 14th century. The book fills a gap in the historiography of economy and trade in the medieval Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Pisan traders sold Western products and bought Oriental goods in Eastern markets, including clothes, wines, grain, slaves, jewels, and more. The Pisan presence in the Levant declined in the second half of the 14th century due to a reorganization of Pisa's economy and the rise of other Italian merchants. The book provides a useful model for reconstructing the presence of other Italian merchants in the Levant. [Extracted from the article]

"Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy" by Jennifer D. Carlson explores the role of gun shop owners in shaping gun culture and politics in America. The book focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic as a backdrop, examining how gun shop owners used armed individualism, conspiracism, and right-wing partisanship to create a distinct political space. The ideology of armed individualism promotes individual solutions to security and democracy issues, while conspiracism rejects government and scientific sources of information. Right-wing partisanship, closely tied to the Republican party, shapes the worldview of gun merchants. The book highlights the potential implications of these ideologies for American liberal democracy. [Extracted from the article]

With large‐scale integration of renewable generation, energy storage is expected to play an important role in providing flexibility to energy systems. In this paper, the authors construct a trilevel Stackelberg game model to study the co‐investment of merchant and regulated storage in energy and reserve markets. The upper‐level problem is a profit‐maximizing storage investment problem with a desired rate‐of‐return solved by a merchant investor. In the middle‐level problem, the system operator (SO) makes regulated storage investment decisions to minimize system cost. In the lower‐level problem, the SO clears energy and reserve markets. The proposed model captures interactions of regulated and merchant storage investment. Also, it clarifies how different ownership structures of storage influence merchant storage profitability and system cost structures in different capital cost of storage investment and wind penetration level scenarios. The numerical results conducted on a 6‐bus illustrative example and the IEEE 24‐bus Reliability test case validate the proposed model. The results show that both regulated and merchant storage can increase social welfare, and social welfare remains almost the same under different ownership structures of storage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including love story between Chibinda Ilunga and Lueji; stories and archives of African merchants on the Gold Coast and urban rebuilding and rehousing plans after 1939 earthquake in Accra.

Through their participation in an unequal Atlantic commerce, African merchants on the Gold Coast consciously transformed their dress in ways that expressed their cultural dynamism and economic success in an increasingly interconnected world. In discussing the web of cross-cultural commercial exchanges between Africa, Asia, and Europe, this article moves away from the tendency to regard Africans who adorned themselves in imported European clothing and textiles as 'creole' or 'Europeanized' elites. Labels like these not only assume the existence of an African cultural essence, but (inadvertently) deny the dynamism that has always characterized African cultures prior to the Atlantic economy. In the case of the Gold Coast, I examine how the Gã and Fante mercantile elite translated imported textiles and clothing into new cultural meanings, aesthetics and norms that emphasized family integrity, power as well as the ancestral, material and commercial value of inherited imported articles of adornment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we examine the emergence and role of merchants and mercantile society on Late Bronze Age Cyprus. We present various site features that reflect the presence or daily practices of merchants, and we consider objects such as weights, scales, seals, and writing implements, discussing how these may signal links to merchants or mercantile practices. We evaluate the relevant data within two different frameworks: elite conflict and class conflict. Cypriot elites played a fundamental role in establishing the politicoeconomic organization of copper production, and it has been argued that Late Bronze Age Cyprus was made up of autonomous regional polities, with an implicit role for elite conflict. We also assess whether a newly formed merchant class may have come into conflict with the existing elite. We argue that a new economic class--that of the merchant--was in the process of formation throughout the Late Cypriot period (ca. 1650-1100 BCE). Whether this mercantile class emerged from the existing (landed) elite or was constituted by newly powerful actors within Cypriot society, or some combination of the two, forms a key point of discussion.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sheds new light on the diverse modes in which migration and religion intersect in shaping everyday transnational practices by exploring the articulations of religion and business migration in an emerging Chinese‐led transnational mission field. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Wenzhou, Rome and Paris, I show how a large group of transnational Chinese merchants has adopted a vigorous homegrown evangelical Christianity as the spiritual and social anchor of their territorial mercantile culture in diaspora. These merchants have actively engaged in producing religious activities and events that link China to Europe and in resacralizing secular real estate and attaching evangelistic meanings to Europe's historic urban spaces. For rural‐originated migrants who embrace a global hierarchy of places, the evangelical discursive distinction between the mundane and the transcendent spheres finds expression in their perceived opposition between the peripheral local and the modern global centre in the global market economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a case study of the Russian-Iranian silk trade, particularly during the period of the Safavid Shāh Ṣafī I (1629–1642). During his reign, substantial changes occurred in the state silk trade, which also affected the Russian-Iranian trade. This study mainly focuses on the amount of Iranian silk exported to Russia by royal merchants, the form the Russian-Iranian silk trade took and the mode of transport as well as the main trade routes. Our research is based on archival historical sources from the Russian state archives of ancient documents. The study thus aims to shine new facts on the Russian-Iranian trade relations in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/Context: This study has two main goals. First, it explores the structural and organizational dynamics of the textile industry and the market in early modern India, eighteenth-century Gujarat in particular. In this context, the paper also examines how the ascendancy of the English East India Company in the political economy of Western India and the region’s transition to a colonial economy impacted the industry, the market, and the relationship between weavers and merchants. Methodology: This paper draws on the literature on textile production and trade, as well as on capitalism in early modern and colonial India, and uses evidence about Gujarat from the records of the English and Dutch East India Companies. Originality: This paper argues that the relationship between weavers and merchants in Surat/Gujarat was dynamic, complementary, and at times, contentious. None of them was able to dominate the relationship, and the English East India Company could not substitute a coercion-based production relation for a market-based one. Conclusions: The dynamics—such as product specialization and innovation, division of labor, the contract system, and forward buying—point to the existence of commercial capitalism in the textile economy. The paper also argues that because of the extraordinary diversity of people engaged in the industry and their varying professional and transactional experiences, it is relevant to recognize that commercial capitalism represents a mode of production that co-existed with others in the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to give an account of the production of cacao in the Girón governorate and its circulation in the internal market of New Granada, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The aim is to reconstruct the commodity chain of cacao, with the different necessary links for the creation of this commodity. The different phases necessary for the cultivation and preparation of cacao are described, as well as the necessary social and commercial relationships between merchants and farmers that allowed for both the financing and circulation of the crops. For the development of this work, testaments, and debt and payment records registered in the Girón notarial archive were reviewed, as well as the alcabala record books of the city and the trade guides located in the Nation's General Archive. The comparison of notarial and fiscal sources allows for an account of the necessary relationships between local merchants and farmers, the magnitude of the cacao trade, and its importance within the local economy at the end of the colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises play a significant role in most economies by contributing to job creation and economic growth. A majority of such merchants rely on business financing, and thus, financial institutions and investors need to assess their performance before making decisions on business loans. However, current methods of predicting merchants' future performance involve their private internal information, such as revenue and customer base, which cannot be shared without potentially exposing critical information. To address this problem, we first propose a novel approach to predicting merchants' future performance using credit card transaction data. Specifically, we construct a merchant network, regarding customers as bridges between merchants, and extract features from the constructed network structure for prediction purposes. Our study results demonstrate that the performance of machine learning models with features extracted from our proposed network is comparable to those with conventional revenue- and customer-based features, while maintaining higher privacy levels when shared with third-party organizations. Our approach offers a practical solution to privacy concerns over data and information required for merchants' performance prediction, enabling safe data-sharing among financial institutions and investors, helping them make more informed decisions on allocating their financial resources while ensuring that merchants' sensitive information is kept confidential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]