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This paper provides an introduction to what is known about trends in international commodity market integration during the second half of the second millennium. Throughout, our focus is on intercontinental trade, since it is the emergence of large-scale trade between the continents that has especially distinguished the centuries following the voyages of da Gama and Columbus. This is by no means to imply that intra-European or intra-Asian trade was in any sense less significant; it is simply a consequence of the limitations of space.

How should we measure integration? Traditional historians and modern trade economists tend to focus on the volume of trade, documenting the growth of trade along particular routes or in particular commodities, or trends in total trade, or the ratio of trade to output. While such data are informative, and while we cite such data in this paper, ideally we would like to have data on the prices of …