GECEM project seeks out new directions and engages primary challenges of global history for the 21st century, including the role of China in the international community, and its relations with western powers, mainly with Europe. The hegemonic position of this Asian giant cannot be fully understood if we do not also consider historical perspectives and the early origins of such relations. This intellectual challenge can be addressed, since the core and main aim of GECEM is to use new historical evidence from China and Europe during the early modern period to shed new light on big questions such as why China did not develop at the same economic levels than northwestern Europe in the first industrialization or why modern capitalism did not emerge in China. These are vital questions, first raised by social science theorists and scholars from the California School.
Consumer behavior, trade networks that allowed the circulation of new goods, technology and people, and the cultural transfers inherent to these features, are the main indicators to analyse the economic development for Qing China and early modern Europe. This project has concluded that there was a very dynamic unofficial trade and merchant networks that the Qing state as well as European states could not regulate. Therefore, the period of analysis for this project from 1680 to 1840 shows the high levels of consumption of global goods in China such as potato, tobacco, red wine, among others, as well as the consumption of Chinese silk, tea and porcelain in Europe. The final results and Open Access publications of GECEM Project have proved this hypothesis. This research, therefore, goes in line with the new revisionist studies of the great divergence and the implementation of the “new” global history through new methodologies of digital humanities (i.e. designing of new databases and software).
GECEM Project Database has been finalized and published as Open Access www.gecemdatabase.eu. This database is authored by the P.I. Manuel Perez-Garcia and Manuel Diaz-Ordoñez (GECEM research fellow). The Intellectual Property Right (IPR) and trademark has been obtained for the GECEM Project Database. This database includes approximately 40,000 historical registers and data on global trade in China’s and Europe’s markets. The joint article published by the P.I. and GECEM researchers titled “Big Data and “New” Global History: Global Goods and Trade Networks in Early Modern China and Europe” at the Itinerario. Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions presents the final results of GECEM Project Database in its process of designing, implementation and data mining.
