Author: Pamela H. SmithPublisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415928151
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 450
Book Description
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Merchants and Marvels
Author: Pamela SmithPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135300283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
The beginning of global commerce in the early modern period had an enormous impact on European culture, changing the very way people perceived the world around them. Merchants and Marvels assembles essays by leading scholars of cultural history, art history, and the history of science and technology to show how ideas about the representation of nature, in both art and science, underwent a profound transformation between the age of the Renaissance and the early 1700s.
The Business of Alchemy
Author: Pamela H. SmithPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400883571
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative, she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) from university to court, his projects from New World colonies to an old-world Pansophic Panopticon, and his ideas from alchemy to economics. Teasing out the many meanings of alchemy for Becher and his contemporaries, she argues that it provided Becher with not only a direct key to power over nature but also a language by which he could convince his princely patrons that their power too must rest on liquid wealth. Agrarian society regarded merchants with suspicion as the nonproductive exploiters of others' labor; however, territorial princes turned to commerce for revenue as the cost of maintaining the state increased. Placing Becher’s career in its social and intellectual context, Smith shows how he attempted to help his patrons assimilate commercial values into noble court culture and to understand the production of surplus capital as natural and legitimate. With emphasis on the practices of natural philosophy and extensive use of archival materials, Smith brings alive the moment of cultural transformation in which science and the modern state emerged.
A History of Global Consumption
Author: Ina Baghdiantz McCabePublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317652657
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313
Book Description
In A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe examines the history of consumption throughout the early modern period using a combination of chronological and thematic discussion, taking a comprehensive and wide-reaching view of a subject that has long been on the historical agenda. The title explores the topic from the rise of the collector in Renaissance Europe to the birth of consumption as a political tool in the eighteenth century. Beginning with an overview of the history of consumption and the major theorists, such as Bourdieu, Elias and Barthes, who have shaped its development as a field, Baghdiantz McCabe approaches the subject through a clear chronological framework. Supplemented by illlustrations in every chapter and ranging in scope from an analysis of the success of American commodities such as tobacco, sugar and chocolate in Europe and Asia to a discussion of the Dutch tulip mania, A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800 is the perfect guide for all students interested in the social, cultural and economic history of the early modern period.
Luxurious Networks
Author: Yulian WuPublisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503600793
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
From precious jade articles to monumental stone arches, Huizhou salt merchants in Jiangnan lived surrounded by objects in eighteenth-century China. How and why did these businessmen devote themselves to these items? What can we learn about eighteenth-century China by examining the relationship between merchants and objects? Luxurious Networks examines Huizhou salt merchants in the material world of High Qing China to reveal a dynamic interaction between people and objects. The Qianlong emperor purposely used objects to expand his influence in economic and cultural fields. Thanks to their broad networks, outstanding managerial skills, and abundant financial resources, these salt merchants were ideal agents for selecting and producing objects for imperial use. In contrast to the typical caricature of merchants as mimics of the literati, these wealthy businessmen became respected individuals who played a crucial role in the political, economic, social, and cultural world of eighteenth-century China. Their life experiences illustrate the dynamic relationship between the Manchu and Han, central and local, and humans and objects in Chinese history.
Author: Pamela H. SmithCuriosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
Author: Robert John Weston EvansPublisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754641025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
'Curiosity' and 'wonder' are topics of increasing interest and importance to Renaissance and Enlightenment historians. Conspicuous in a host of disciplines from history of science and technology to history of art, literature, and society, both have assumed a prominent place in studies of the Early Modern period. This volume brings together an international group of scholars to investigate the various manifestations of, and relationships between, 'curiosity' and 'wonder' from the 16th to the 18th century. Focused case studies on texts, objects and individuals explore the multifaceted natures of these themes, highlighting the intense fascination and continuing scrutiny to which each has been subjected over three centuries.
Early Modern Things
Author: Paula FindlenPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351055720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508
Book Description
Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.
Assembling the Tropics
Author: Hugh CaglePublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108186890
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
From popular fiction to modern biomedicine, the tropics are defined by two essential features: prodigious nature and debilitating illness. That was not always so. In this engaging and imaginative study, Hugh Cagle shows how such a vision was created. Along the way, he challenges conventional accounts of the Scientific Revolution. The history of 'the tropics' is the story of science in Europe's first global empire. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Portugal established colonies from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia and South America, enabling the earliest comparisons of nature and disease across the tropical world. Assembling the Tropics shows how the proliferation of colonial approaches to medicine and natural history led to the assemblage of 'the tropics' as a single, coherent, and internally consistent global region. This is a story about how places acquire medical meaning, about how nature and disease become objects of scientific inquiry, and about what is at stake when that happens.
Metropolitan Science
Author: Rebekah HiggittPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350417041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
Book Description
Exploring distinctive practices in the artisanal, mercantile, and governmental sites of London, Metropolitan Science offers a new perspective on the development of a scientific culture between the years 1600-1800. Beginning with the demographics of London in the 17th and 18th centuries, including its attraction of migrants, importance as a centre of empire, and the role of its institutions in government, the authors analyse how and why London was a unique site of scientific activity. Through the use of case studies, such as the Tower of London's Royal Mint, and the Livery Company Halls, this book examines the city's sites of exchange for knowledge and practice, and highlights the importance of both public and private spaces. With exploration of London's military and colonial history, the authors acknowledge how its port and maritime trade were not only central to growth and protection, but also facilitated the organisation, assessment, valuation, and pursuit of knowledge in the city. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that London corporations produced unique knowledge communities that drew on networks across the city and beyond, and uses a variety of spatial and material approaches to reveal the use, representation, and exchange of practice in these collective settings.
