Economics

Short Teaching Module: Building Materials as an Indicator of Transnational Encounters in Malaysia
Building materials are an important component of construction. The characteristics of each material determine the properties of a structure that can be built.

Wooden Stockade on Penang Island, 18th century
This stockade was painted by Captain Elisha Trapaud in 1787 and the painting is preserved in the India Office Library in London.

Short Teaching Module: Portraying Women Workers: Beyond Norma Rae
Starting at the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. and insular government offices and textile and garment businesses incorporated women of the New South and Puerto Rico into manufacturing in distinct yet interrelated ways.

Norma Rae: Depicting Women's Labor History through Film
In this still shot from the movie Norma Rae, two pretty and petite white actors represent southern mill hands. Norma, portrayed by the famous actress Sally Field, stands with her mother (Barbara Baxley).

Puerto Rican Needleworkers in a Factory, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1942
This government photograph provides an important contrast to the popular culture images of poor southern whites. During the 1940s and 1950s, U.S. government agencies hired photographers to travel the main island of Puerto Rico to capture the conditions of working people.

Brochure for the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition / Charleston Exposition, 1901-1902
This is the cover for a pamphlet to promote the Charleston Exposition and recruit exhibitors and attendees from along the entire U.S. Atlantic, which ran from New England to Florida to Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Rashid graduates from Oregon Agricultural college, 1908
Indian and other Asian immigrants attended land grant universities across the United States in the early twentieth century.

Business contract between Richard P. Waters and his Omani-Zanzibari trading partner, Esau bin Abdul Rahman
This contract represents how business was typically transacted in Zanzibar and throughout the Omani Empire.

Short Teaching Unit: The Omani Empire and the Center of the Emerging Global Economy, 1500-1850
This essay pushes back against European-dominated narratives of world history to suggest that the Omani Empire was a crucial space for the emergence of our present-day system of global capitalism.

A letter from U.S. President Andrew Jackson to the Senate Dated Washington, May 30, 1834
A letter from President Andrew Jackson to the Senate where the President discusses the possibility of extending US trade. Jackson was particularly interested in the potential trade connections with areas around the Indian Ocean.