The relatively new research field of global history has posed the question for economic and social historians of how to collect and analyze data, which enable them to make sound quantitative comparisons across time and space. This especially applies to the degree of commercialization, monetization and ‘marketization’, including the occurrence of wage labour. The availability of data is very unevenly spread across the world.

The project “Local and European wages in the Portuguese Indian Ocean 1500-1650: new sources and analytical tools” will address these two different historiographical issues using so far untapped sources and providing tools to analyze them. These are global wage comparisons and the nature of labour relations in the early Luso-Indian Ocean world before the politico-military dominance was firmly established by the Europeans.