Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration & Cultural Exchange

Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration & Cultural Exchange is collection of digitized primary sources documenting the historical trade of fifteen major global commodities. The commodities are chocolate, coffee, cotton, fur, opium, oil, porcelain, silver and gold, spices, sugar, tea, timber tobacco, wheat, and wine and spirits. Material types include business accounts, mercantile papers and correspondence, government reports, pamphlets, dock records, trade records, maps, advertising memorabilia and ephemera, photographs, paintings, prints, and digital images of objects and artefacts. The documents in this collection are primarily in English, and the collection primarily describes trade from an Anglophone perspective.

Materials in this collection were sourced from over twenty libraries, archives, and museums and over a dozen companies and trade organizations around the world.