Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles

Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles PDF Author: Chandra Mukerji
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521599597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In seventeenth-century France, land took on new importance for the practice of politics and rituals of court life. In her major new book, Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the two seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design. She shows how, at Versailles in particular, the royal park showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality. She challenges the association of state power with social and legal structures alone and demonstrates the importance for Louis XIV and his state of a controlled physical site, a demarcated French territory within the wider European geo-political continent.

Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles

Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles PDF Author: Chandra Mukerji
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521599597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
In seventeenth-century France, land took on new importance for the practice of politics and rituals of court life. In her major new book, Chandra Mukerji highlights the connections between the two seemingly disparate activities of engineering and garden design. She shows how, at Versailles in particular, the royal park showcased French skills in using nature and art to design a distinctively French landscape and create a naturalized political territoriality. She challenges the association of state power with social and legal structures alone and demonstrates the importance for Louis XIV and his state of a controlled physical site, a demarcated French territory within the wider European geo-political continent.

Impossible Engineering

Impossible Engineering PDF Author: Chandra Mukerji
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400833140
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
The Canal du Midi, which threads through southwestern France and links the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was an astonishing feat of seventeenth-century engineering--in fact, it was technically impossible according to the standards of its day. Impossible Engineering takes an insightful and entertaining look at the mystery of its success as well as the canal's surprising political significance. The waterway was a marvel that connected modern state power to human control of nature just as surely as it linked the ocean to the sea. The Canal du Midi is typically characterized as the achievement of Pierre-Paul Riquet, a tax farmer and entrepreneur for the canal. Yet Chandra Mukerji argues that it was a product of collective intelligence, depending on peasant women and artisans--unrecognized heirs to Roman traditions of engineering--who came to labor on the waterway in collaboration with military and academic supervisors. Ironically, while Louis XIV and his treasury minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert used propaganda to present France as a new Rome, the Canal du Midi was being constructed with unrecognized classical methods. Still, the result was politically potent. As Mukerji shows, the project took land and power from local nobles, using water itself as a silent agent of the state to disrupt traditions of local life that had served regional elites. Impossible Engineering opens a surprising window into the world of seventeenth-century France and illuminates a singular work of engineering undertaken to empower the state through technical conquest of nature.

Repairing Infrastructures

Repairing Infrastructures PDF Author: Christopher R. Henke
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262539705
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
An investigation of the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Infrastructures—communication, food, transportation, energy, and information—are all around us, and their enduring function and influence depend on the constant work of repair. In this book, Christopher Henke and Benjamin Sims explore the causes and consequences of the strange, ambivalent, and increasingly central role of infrastructure repair in modern life. Henke and Sims offer examples, from local to global, to investigate not only the role of repair in maintaining infrastructures themselves but also the social and political orders that are created and sustained through them. Repair can encompass not only the kind of work we most commonly associate with the term but also any set of practices aimed at restoring a sense of normalcy or credibility to the places and institutions we inhabit in everyday life. From cases as diverse as the repair of building systems on a university campus, a conflict over retrofitting a bridge while protecting murals painted on it, and the global challenge posed by climate change, Henke and Sims assemble a range of examples to illustrate key conceptual points about the role of repair. They show that repair is an essential if often overlooked aspect of understanding the broader impact and politics of infrastructures. Understanding repair helps us better understand infrastructures and the scope of their influence on our lives.

Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles Under Louis XIV

Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles Under Louis XIV PDF Author: Robert W. Berger
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081224107X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The first book to examine how the vast gardens of Versailles were used as a setting for the receptions of ambassadors, heads of state, and other visiting dignitaries who conducted diplomatic and political business with France.

Orientalism in Early Modern France

Orientalism in Early Modern France PDF Author: Ina Baghdiantz McCabe
Publisher: Berg
ISBN: 1845203747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Francis I's ties with the Ottoman Empire marked the birth of court-sponsored Orientalism in France. Under Louis XIV, French society was transformed by cross-cultural contacts with the Ottomans, India, Persia, China, Siam and the Americas. The consumption of silk, cotton cloth, spices, coffee, tea, china, gems, flowers and other luxury goods transformed daily life and gave rise to a new discourse about the 'Orient' which in turn shaped ideas about economy and politics, specifically absolutism and the monarchy. An original account of the ancient regime, this book highlights France's use of the exotic and analyzes French discourse about Islam and the 'Orient'.

A Guide to Spatial History

A Guide to Spatial History PDF Author: Konrad Lawson
Publisher: Olsokhagen
ISBN: 1737136813
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
This guide provides an overview of the thematic areas, analytical aspects, and avenues of research which, together, form a broader conversation around doing spatial history. Spatial history is not a field with clearly delineated boundaries. For the most part, it lacks a distinct, unambiguous scholarly identity. It can only be thought of in relation to other, typically more established fields. Indeed, one of the most valuable utilities of spatial history is its capacity to facilitate conversations across those fields. Consequently, it must be discussed in relation to a variety of historiographical contexts. Each of these have their own intellectual genealogies, institutional settings, and conceptual path dependencies. With this in mind, this guide surveys the following areas: territoriality, infrastructure, and borders; nature, environment, and landscape; city and home; social space and political protest; spaces of knowledge; spatial imaginaries; cartographic representations; and historical GIS research.

Sensible Politics

Sensible Politics PDF Author: William A. Callahan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190071753
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Visual images are everywhere in international politics. But how are we to understand them? In Sensible Politics, William A. Callahan uses his expertise in theory and filmmaking to explore not only what visuals mean, but also how visuals can viscerally move and connect us in "affective communities of sense." The book's rich analysis of visual images (photographs, film, art) and visual artifacts (maps, veils, walls, gardens, cyberspace) shows how critical scholarship needs to push beyond issues of identity and security to appreciate the creative politics of social-ordering and world-ordering. Here "sensible politics" isn't just sensory, but looks beyond icons and ideology to the affective politics of everyday life. It challenges our Eurocentric understanding of international politics by exploring the meaning and impact of visuals from Asia and the Middle East. Sensible Politics offers a unique approach to politics that allows us to not only think visually, but also feel visually-and creatively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.

Federalism & Englightenment in Ger

Federalism & Englightenment in Ger PDF Author: Maiken Umbach
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781852851774
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Federalism and Enlightenment identifies two connected features of great but underrated importance in German history; the strength of devolved, federal government inside the Holy Roman Empire; and the influence of ideas imported from England. Both stood out against the militaristic absolutism and admiration of France associated with Prussia. The German Enlightenment has usually been seen as an extension of the French Enlightenment, yet the influence of English ideas in agricultural, education and constitutional issues had a considerable impact, especially at the smaller courts. Whig constitutionalism had a strong appeal to and influence on many German princes; something that the tradition of historical writing begun by Ranke, in which the triumph of centralised government was the dominant theme, has tended to obscure. Prince Franz of Dessau, the champion of the Fuerstenbund, the league of German princes opposed to Prussian expansion, was influenced by Stowe far more than by Versailles at his palace at Woerlitz. While the federal constitution of the Holy Roman Empire was abolished in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the subsequent centralisafion of Germany was not as inevitable as it has often been assumed. Even today the German government is the most federal in Europe, reflecting a long-term reality.

Globalization Revisited

Globalization Revisited PDF Author: Grahame Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317598466
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Written by one of the leading scholars of global politics, Globalization Revisited is a major new book for students of globalization. It describes and explains the challenges to liberalism and the global order as result of globalizing forces - from financial interconnectedness to the growth of religious fundamentalisms. The text: provides a detailed analysis of the economic and financial aspects of globalization; examines the changes to global power and governance created by globalization including its effect on the sovereignty of the nation state; discusses recent trends such as the increased use of networks and social media; assesses the rise of globalizing fundamentalism; analyzes the challenges to globalization posed by contemporary events such as the global financial crisis. This book will be essential reading for all students of globalization, and will be of great interest to students of global politics and global governance.

Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France

Medea, Magic, and Modernity in France PDF Author: Amy Wygant
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317098978
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Bringing together the previously disparate fields of historical witchcraft, reception history, poetics, and psychoanalysis, this innovative study shows how the glamour of the historical witch, a spell that she cast, was set on a course, over a span of three hundred years from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, to become a generally broadcast glamour of appearance. Something that a woman does, that is, became something that she has. The antique heroine Medea, witch and barbarian, infamous poisoner, infanticide, regicide, scourge of philanderers, and indefatigable traveller, serves as the vehicle of this development. Revived on the stage of modernity by La Péruse in the sixteenth century, Corneille in the seventeenth, and the operatic composer Cherubini in the eighteenth, her stagecraft and her witchcraft combine, author Amy Wygant argues, to stun her audience into identifying with her magic and making it their own. In contrast to previous studies which have relied upon contemporary printed sources in order to gauge audience participation in and reaction to early modern theater, Wygant argues that psychoanalytic thought about the behavior of groups can be brought to bear on the question of "what happened" when the early modern witch was staged. This cross-disciplinary study reveals the surprising early modern trajectory of our contemporary obsession with magic. Medea figures the movement of culture in history, and in the mirror of the witch on the stage, a mirror both appealing and appalling, our own cultural performances are reflected. It concludes with an analysis of Diderot's claim that the historical process itself is magical, and with the moment in Revolutionary France when the slight and fragile body of the golden-throated singer, Julie-Angélique Scio, became a Medea for modernity: not a witch or a child-murderess, but, as all the press reviews insist, a woman.