Author: Karel Davids
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004233881
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
In Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences Karel Davids analyses the influence of religious contexts on technological change in China and Europe between c.700 and 1800.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004381562
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
In Navigating History: Economy, Society, Knowledge, and Nature the contributors present new research that touches on the core themes developed in Karel Davids’s work. The book reflects Davids’s omnivorous character as a scholar. Nevertheless, there are common strands that run throughout the introduction and fourteen chapters gathered here. Major themes include resources of knowledge, cultures of learning, and humans and their natural environment. Together, these fourteen essays provide a fascinating panorama of social, economic, and environmental history of the past millennium. The book seeks to bring back the different levels of geographical scope, fusing the local, the national and the global. Contributors are: Ulbe Bosma, Pepijn Brandon, Jaap Bruijn, Petra van Dam, Victor Enthoven, Sabine Go, Marjolein ’t Hart, Raoul De Kerf, Jan Lucassen, Karin Lurvink, Joel Mokyr, Marijn Molema, Bert de Munck, Pál Nyiri, Harm Pieters, Matthias van Rossum, Joost Schokkenbroek, Jeroen Touwen, Wybren Verstegen, and Jan Luiten van Zanden.
Author: Hailian Chen
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004383042
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 822
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Book Description
Hailian Chen’s pioneering study presents the first comprehensive history of Chinese zinc—an essential base metal used to produce brass and coin and a global commodity—over the long eighteenth century. Zinc, she argues, played a far greater role in the Qing economy and in integrating China into an emerging global economy, than has previously been recognized. Using commodity chain analysis and exploring over 5,800 items of archival documents, Chen demonstrates how this metal was produced, transported, traded, and consumed by human agents. Situating the zinc story within the human-environment framework, this book covers a broad and interdisciplinary range of political economy, material culture, environment, technology, and society, which casts new light on our understanding of early modern China.
Author: Tirthankar Roy
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472588452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 387
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Book Description
What are the problems addressed by the growing field of global economic history? What debates and methodologies does it engage with? As Global Economic History shows, there are many answers to these questions. Riello and Roy, alongside 20 leading academics from the US, UK, Europe, Australia and Japan, explain why a global perspective matters to economic history. The impressive cast recruited by the editors brings together top scholars in their respective areas of expertise, including John McNeill, Patrick O'Brien, and Prasannan Parthasarathi. An ambitious scope of topics ranges from the 'Great Divergence' to the rise of global finance, to the New World and the global silver economy. Chapters are organized both thematically (Divergence in Global History and Emergence of a World Economy), and geographically (Regional Perspectives on Global Economic Change), ensuring the global perspective required on these challenging courses today. The result is a textbook which provides students with a quick and confident grasp of the field and its essential issues.
Author: Jonathan Daly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350029475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
One thousand years ago, a traveler to Baghdad or the Chinese capital Kaifeng would have discovered a vast and flourishing city of broad streets, spacious gardens, and sophisticated urban amenities; meanwhile, Paris, Rome, and London were cramped and unhygienic collections of villages, and Europe was a backwater. How, then, did it rise to world preeminence over the next several centuries? This is the central historical conundrum of modern times. How Europe Made the Modern World draws upon the latest scholarship dealing with the various aspects of the West's divergence, including geography, demography, technology, culture, institutions, science and economics. It avoids the twin dangers of Eurocentrism and anti-Westernism, strongly emphasizing the contributions of other cultures of the world to the West's rise while rejecting the claim that there was nothing distinctive about Europe in the premodern period. Daly provides a concise summary of the debate from both sides, whilst also presenting his own provocative arguments. Drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, and including maps and images to illuminate key evidence, this book will inspire students to think critically and engage in debates rather than accepting a single narrative of the rise of the West. It is an ideal primer for students studying Western Civilization and World History courses.
Author: Todd LeVasseur
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317242769
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
In 1967, Lynn White, Jr.’s seminal article The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis was published, essentially establishing the academic study of religion and nature. White argues that religions—particularly Western Christianity—are a major cause of worldwide ecological crises. He then asserts that if we are to halt, let alone revert, anthropogenic damages to the environment, we need to radically transform religious cosmologies. White’s hugely influential thesis has been cited thousands of times in a variety of disciplines, including but not limited to religious studies, environmental ethics, history, ecological science, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. In practical terms, the ecological crisis to which White was responding has only worsened in the decades since the article was published. This collection of original essays by leading scholars in a variety of interdisciplinary settings, including religion and nature, environmental ethics, animal studies, ecofeminism, restoration ecology, and ecotheology, considers the impact of White’s arguments, offering constructive criticism as well as reflections on the ongoing, ever-changing scholarly debate about the way religion and culture contribute to both environmental crises and to their possible solutions. Religion and Ecological Crisis addresses a wide range of topics related to White’s thesis, including its significance for environmental ethics and philosophy, the response from conservative Christians and evangelicals, its importance for Asian religious traditions, ecofeminist interpretations of the article, and which perspectives might have, ultimately, been left out of his analysis. This book is a timely reflection on the legacy and continuing challenge of White’s influential article.
Author: Patrick Karl O'Brien
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030546144
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 130
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Book Description
This book is a critical interpretation of a seminal and protracted debate in comparative global economic history. Since its emergence, in now classic publications in economic history between 1997-2000, debate on the divergent economic development that has marked the long-term economic growth of China and Western Europe has generated a vast collection of books and articles, conferences, networks, and new journals as well as intense interest from the media and educated public. O’Brien provides an historiographical survey and critique of Western views on the long-run economic development of the Imperial Economy of China – a field of commentary that stretches back to the Enlightenment. The book’s structure and core argument is concentrated upon an elaboration of, and critical engagement with, the major themes of recent academic debate on the “Great Divergence” and it will be of enormous interest to academics and students of economic history, political economy, the economics of growth and development, state formation, statistical measurements, environmental history, and the histories of science and globalization.
Author: Jonathan Daly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350066141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 697
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Book Description
In this second edition of The Rise of Western Power, Jonathan Daly retains the broad sweep of his introduction to the history of Western civilization as well as introducing new material into every chapter, enhancing the book's global coverage and engaging with the latest historical debates. The West's history is one of extraordinary success: no other region, empire, culture, or civilization has left so powerful a mark upon the world. Daly charts the West's achievements-representative government, the free enterprise system, modern science, and the rule of law-as well as its misdeeds: two World Wars, the Holocaust, imperialistic domination, and the Atlantic slave trade. Taking us through a series of revolutions, he explores the contributions of other cultures and civilizations to the West's emergence, weaving in historical, geographical, and cultural factors. The new edition also contains more material on themes such as the environment and gender, and additional coverage of India, China and the Islamic world. Daly's engaging narrative is accompanied by timelines, maps and further reading suggestions, along with a companion website featuring study questions, over 100 primary sources and 60 historical maps to enable further study.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900425157X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372
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Book Description
Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy investigates how technological skills and knowledge were reproduced and disseminated in the advanced agrarian societies of China, India, Russia and Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. The book offers regional surveys of Europe, China and India, as well as comparative studies of building, porcelain manufacturing, instrument making, printing, and shipbuilding. The authors engage with the on-going debate about the ‘great divergence’ between Asia and Europe, and its possible causes. Technology has so far had a minor role in that debate. This book is bound to change that, through the bold claims made by various contributors. Contributors are: Karel Davids, S.R. Epstein †, Gijs Kessler, Jan Lucassen, Christine Moll-Murata, Patrick O'Brien, Kenneth Pomeranz, Maarten Prak, Tirthankar Roy, Richard Unger, and Jan Luiten van Zanden.
Author: Walter Scheidel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691216738
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 698
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Book Description
The gripping story of how the end of the Roman Empire was the beginning of the modern world The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, Escape from Rome offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world? In an absorbing narrative that begins with ancient Rome but stretches far beyond it, from Byzantium to China and from Genghis Khan to Napoleon, Scheidel shows how the demise of Rome and the enduring failure of empire-building on European soil launched an economic transformation that changed the continent and ultimately the world.
