The INTRECCI Project Team
Prof Edmond Smith is the Principal Investigator for the INTRECCI project and Professor in Economic Cultures at The University of Manchester. Their research explores histories of globalisation and capitalism and they have conducted research in Africa, America, Asia and Europe, with the goal of better understanding how everyday experiences of the economy and personal behaviours bring about systemic changes in local and global economies. Their book's cover the global history of Britain's economic development and wide-ranging studies of global trade across the premodern world. In addition to their academic work, they maintain strong relationships with finance and policy sectors, with a particular focus on economic security, innovation, and long-run economic change. For more info...
Dr Mariana Boscariol is Research Associate in Early Modern Global History for the INTRECCI project, with expertise in the history of Portugal’s trade and empire. In this role, their primary goal is to help uncover the Portuguese participation and contribution to the institutional creation, continuity and change within and between the Gulf of Guinea, the Gulf of Khambhat and the Straits of Malacca. Considering the Portuguese empire’s characteristics and structure, they are particularly focused on exploring how intertwined informal and formal activities in these regions were from the 15th to the 18th century, including the central role of religious agents and institutions in Asia. For more info...
Dr Shounak Ghosh is Research Associate for the INTRECCI project on early modern global history. Their research explores the meanings and shifting forms of diplomatic practice among the court societies of Mughal South Asia, Safavid Iran, and the Deccan sultanates in peninsular southern India that communicated in Persian. As a research associate for INTRECCI, they will be contributing towards the cultural dimension of the project by inquiring the role of individuals in forging intellectual, spiritual, and mercantile networks that linked the distant shores of the western Indian Ocean and fostered and sustained centuries of interactions between their littoral and hinterland societies. For more info...
Dr Safya Morshed is a Research Associate in Global History for the INTRECCI project exploring the link between globalisation and institutional and commercial change across Asia and Africa. They are a Mughal historian and an expert in theories of institutional development and state formation. Their contribution to the project is to bring expertise in global patterns of institutional development, especially for early modern South Asia and the Islamic World which have been studied less in a comparative framework. During the project, they intend to analyse how global interactions and exchanges created an impetus for change within an already very diverse and interconnected commercial space. For more info...
Affiliated INTRECCI Researchers
Patrick van der Geest was a visiting PhD student with the INTRECCI project at The University of Manchester in 2025. They are currently a PhD student at Lund Univeristy in Sweden, where they are completed a doctoral project on the British-Dutch merchant and banking house Hope & Co., exploring what their bookkeeping and business strategies reveal about their role in integrating European and colonial trade and credit systems between 1740 and 1830. For more info...