HELP! I’m trying to come up with a title for a course I’m proposing. Architecture of merchant capitalist empires. The course is about the Hanseatic League, the Venetian and Ottoman seaborne empires, and the East India Companies, and all the new building types they needed for infrastructure – guildhalls, shipyards, colonial trading post forts etc. AND OF COURSE treating their ships as buildings.
Boring title: Building Merchant Empires
More exciting but misleading: Pirates, Princes and Palaces
…anyone got anything? I’d love to get a Guns, Germs and Steel/Lawyers, Guns and Money type title, but I’m open to anything awesome.
Tattered Remains of Tartary 
Mechants, Murder, and Mansions.
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Strange how it resists the A B & C structure in order to pursue structuralist dyads: Tombs “of” Capital, Temples “of” Commerce, Spaces “of” Cash.
In your structure is there a binary opposition and a supplement? “Commerce, Commons or Cloister: Your Subtitle Here.”
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Movable Feasts: The Empires of Merchant Princes
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Kevyn Winkless I’d love to do some inversion, like Feastable Moves or something that actually made sense.
Scott Martin nice idea… but it doesn’t come immediately to mind for this course. But it’s something to think about…
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Merchants, Guns, and Profit.
Forts, factories, and fortunes.
Palaces, ports, and profit.
When companies ruled the world.
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The Spice Must Flow: Merchant Sea Fortresses.
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Silks, Spices and Spaces
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+duncan mcphedran I once used The Spice Must Flow as the title of a one-off anthropology lecture on Orientalism and empire building (esp the mythology that builds up around the exotic environment and native workforce in the minds of the colonizers), but recieved a depressing number of questions about that title. I suppose my choice to include a sizeable section on Michael Taussig’s work with rubber harvesters in S.America might have been a problem, but still you’d think…
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Follow the Money: trade societies and state making. Or something similar.
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Richard if you don’t videocast this course I’ll be terribly pissed off.
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Glorification and Function! The Architecture of Rapacity.
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Cathedrals to Cash: Empire Building One Brick at a Time
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Richard Grenville Inversion is hard on this one…irreverence and a “professor joke” is the best I can do at this hour of the morning.
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Jeff Russell Ports, Profits, Palaces is pretty damn good. With a subtitle. Empires of stealing and selling.
Only maybe a bit less murderhobo.
Gus L The Architecture of Rapacity is delightful and I have to use it some day.
Kevyn Winkless I might use Cathedrals of Cash for my book on the development of passenger shipping. The cargo that pays and pays.
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oooo
Merchants, Mariners, and Muderhobos: Subtitle about spices and trade
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for my Marco Polo, the Man, the Myth course:
Sadness and Spaghetti: debunking travelers’ tales, from Marco Polo to Sir Ranulph Feinnes
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Charters and Concessions?
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Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash: the Making of Modern Capitalism.
(The first and third corners of the triangle are obvious; I’m sure you can come up with something for the second other than it’s what capitalism forcibly does to everyone.)
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“Merchants and Their Bones: the Structures of Early Capitalism”
“Buildings, Boats and Bullets or How To Buy The World”
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Adam Thornton I’m thinking this is a couple of hundred years before that particular triangle.
Besides the course on video (watching a Yale Rome->Early Middle Ages course now) I’d love to see the reading list.
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Jon Hiesfelter that’s a great course. Best part: listening the professor saying Augustine complaining about ignorant mystics living in deserts were closer to god than his pompous ass upper class twat.
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Paolo Greco Yeah, laughed out loud at that one.
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