The starting point of this paper is a specific garment, namely a colorful men´s trousers from Mindanao and of Philippine Muslim origin. The trousers were exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, the biggest world fair that aimed to justify the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines and its civilizing mission such as the 'uplifting' of their new subjects. Therefore, many Philippine objects and also people were displayed for the gaze of an American audience. The paper starts with analyzing the trousers by focusing on the material aspects. The analysis is then complemented with textual and visual sources such as reports, newspaper articles, and photographs that were produced by Spanish and U.S. colonial actors at the turn of the twentieth century. The triangulation of different source materials opens up for reflections on the disciplinary divides between archaeology, anthropology, and history, which are based on different research questions, methodologies, and disciplinary traditions. The paper argues for the importance of trans-disciplinarity and the need for collaborations, not only between researchers from various disciplinary backgrounds but equally important between researchers, practitioners, and local communities. The paper urges for methodological approaches such as cross-analysis of material, visual, and textual sources for the purpose of having a multi-perspective tool that helps to challenge Eurocentric perspectives and assumptions. Despite the colonial provenance of the garment, the cross-analytical approach enables us to counter normative assumptions such as the binary tension between “indigenous costumes” versus “Western fashion” because it raises questions about the performativity of indigeneity and challenges essentialist notions of Philippine ethnic communities that locate them outside of modernity and capitalist endeavors.

The aim of this individual paper is to explore a new approach to the history of “things” by focusing on the early modern rayskin trade. Rayskin was highly valued functionally and aesthetically for the sword-hilts in early modern Japan, where, as may be commonly believed, the swords were regarded as a symbol of privilege of samuraiwarriors. Although rayskin had unique and strong demand in early modern Japan and was brought by long-distance trade from tropical Asian waters to Japan, its trading has been overlooked in existing global history, as rayskin is not considered among so-called global commodities and had no cultural effect on Europe. Rayskin trade, however, needs to be studied deeper, given that such a culturally symbolical product has induced a long-distance trade and has deeply connected early modern, traditionally viewed as isolated, Japan with the rest of the world.For this purpose, this paper analyses rayskin trade from two angles. Firstly it explores how the demand for rayskin grew in early modern Japan on the basis of contemporary local sources. Secondly it examines how the rayskin trade developed in the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries mainly based on the Dutch East India Company records. This will help place the Dutch trading activity in the historical continuum of the early modern Asian trade in which a variety of actors with indigenous and European backgrounds were involved. I believe my presenting this paper on site in person would lead a fruitful discussion with participants.

The suggested communication takes an anthropological look at the deck of the great sailing boats often visiting Brittany harbours at the beginning of the 18th century. Seafarers, forming its crews, carry out various missions: fishing campaigns in Newfoundland, private operations at the English Channel or in the Gulf of Guinea, traffics in the Caribbeans or the South Seas. Their eating habits and more generally the material environment in which they operate should enlighten us about the functioning of modern societies. The written sources are mainly built up of admiralty funds from the main Brittany harbours. Judicial investigations themselves are particularly interesting because they sometimes show, almost accidentally, the social implications that centre around this strong moment of sociability that mealtime represents: an altercation occurs during that time, witnesses describe then what they eat, when the conflict does not lie in the organization of the meal itself. Underwater archaeology resonates with these fragments of life, echoed in the archives. On wrecks, cooking utensils and leftovers give us a better understanding of the interactions on board. Does meeting between judicial archives and underwater archaeology allow us to consider the ship as a microcosm of the 18th century society? Is the ship also a laboratory of new habits at a time when Europe's interactions with the rest of the world are profoundly upsetting modern societies?

The early period in the valleys and lakes of the centre of Mexico is filled with conflicts and tensions between Spanish and indigenous people and cattle, with at least 100.000 head of cattle by 1560 and many reports of these animals eating indigenous peoples’ crops. These tensions would reverberate throughout the rest of the 16th century and the rest of the colonial period. Previous research has focused on the consequences of these frictions after 1550, on aspects such as the development of the hacienda, the transformation of landscapes, and changes in indigenous economic activities. Nevertheless, the formative period of 1519-1550 has been insufficiently studied. I propose to study the area having Mexico-Tenochtitlan as a connecting centre for towns, villages and estancias, which provide it with food, and especially, with meat and leather from cattle. In this paper, I explore one aspect of the creation of these colonial landscapes, particularly, the intersection between meat and leather production with the political alliances of Mexico-Tenochtitlan during this time. The main sources will be the Actas de Cabildo from Mexico-Tenochtitlan, complemented by the detailed information found in the Mercedes volume at the Archivo General de la Nación, in Mexico City. I show how the relationships between actors served to acquire economic and political standing, in a city still in reconstruction after the war of conquest, providing a new and more nuanced understanding of how the Spanish colonial system worked in the early 16th century.

The late Russian empire experienced global trends of modernity – the emergence of the new sciences of nutrition, veterinary studies and zootechnics, the industrialization of slaughtering processes and livestock commodification, the commercialization of agriculture and changing understanding of food, as well as the development of modern communications networks. Russia’s colonial subordination of the Steppes north of the Black and the Caspian seas allowed for increased animal husbandry. Highlighting colonial relationships, cattle was driven from the non-Russian borderlands to be slaughtered and eaten in the imperial capitals of Moscow and St Petersburg. The paper introduces meatification as a new research problem for studying the late Russian empire in the context of global developments of the time. It analyses the synergies between the livestock commodification, agricultural modernization, and dietary reform on the one hand and evolving knowledge regimes and imperial anxieties on the other. The study suggests that meatification bears epistemic value for historicized discussions about Russia as a Janus-faced empire, being simultaneously both a part of the global imperial core and the Western periphery. It also advances discussions on the “connected histories of empire,” intertwined histories of empire and environment, as well as offers new insights on the globalization of non-Western empires.