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This study investigates the contribution made by outsiders in accumulating knowledge from the days of the East India Company until the early twentieth century, when photography became an important tool for recording information. It focuses on heterogeneous voices on the periphery, who interacted with the indigenous population to produce knowledge in original or unexpected ways that extended beyond the limits prescribed by the term ‘colonial.’ Largely unrecognized today, their endeavors to satisfy their own intellectual curiosity, or improve their material circumstances, produced a perspective on colonial life that stripped away conventions; where their ordinary everyday experiences sometimes became extraordinary, as they forged new networks throughout the subcontinent and beyond its frontiers. Their journeys and experiences offer a discursive historical construct as significant as official reports, censuses, and surveys, and contribute towards our understanding of the diverse creative processes through which intellectual histories of the colonial state were constructed.
Through ten case studies by international specialists, this book investigates the circulation and production of scientific knowledge between 1750 and 1945 in the fields of agriculture, astronomy, botany, cartography, medicine, statistics, and zoology. In this period, most of the world was under some form of imperial control, while science emerged as a discrete field of activity. What was the relationship between empire and science? Was science just an instrument for imperial domination? While such guiding questions place the book in the tradition of science and empire studies, it offers a fresh perspective in dialogue with global history and circulatory approaches. The book demonstrates, not...
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.
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Archaeology offers comprehensive perspectives on the origins and developments of the discipline of archaeology and the direction of future advances in the field. Written by thirty-six archaeologists and historians from all over the world, it covers a wide range of themes and debates, including biographical accounts of key figures, scientific techniques and archaeological fieldwork practices, institutional contexts, and the effects of religion, nationalism, and colonialism on the development of archaeology.
The book shows how the tribute-paying population in Peru and New Spain negotiated their categorization throughout the colonial period. It explains the fiscal legislation and its application from above as well as how it was shaped from below.
This book explores the public debates among scholars that took place in Early Cold War Poland. The author challenges the traditional narrative on the ‘Sovietisation’ of Central and Eastern European countries and proposes to see this process not as a spread of Marxist ideology or a Soviet institutional model, but as an attempt to force scholars to rapidly adopt new academic and civic virtues. This book argues that this project failed to succeed in Poland and shows how the struggle against these new virtues united both Marxist and non-Marxist scholars. While covering the arc of Polish scholarly debates, the author invites the reader to go beyond Poland and to use ‘virtues’ as a framework for reflections on both the foundations of scholarly practice and the ‘nature’ of authoritarian regimes with their ambition to teach scholars how to be ‘virtuous.’
Building on the new critical historiography about the evolution of the European state, the book analyses how administrators, scientists, popular publicists and other actors tried to redefine the realms of state action in the "Sattelzeit" (Koselleck). By focussing on the specific strategies of these actors and on the transnational circulation and dissemination of state related knowledge itself, the contributors of the book highlight the fluidity and the interconnections of the European debate in the crucial period of the development of the modern nation-state and its administration. They study the common European features of the evolution of a new type of statehood built upon multiple circulations and transfers that forged administrative practices in the different fields of state action. Analysing important fields of expertise ranging from agricultural knowledge, mining sciences to anthropological knowledge, which laid the basis for the new "scientific" foundations of administration, the book underlines the necessity of a re-evaluation of the classical approaches to the history of state in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Forms, Formats and the Circulation of Knowledge explores the printscape – the mental mapping of knowledge in all its printed shapes – to chart the British networks of publishers, printers, copyright-holders, readers and authors. This transdisciplinary volume skilfully recovers innovations and practices in the book trade between 1688 and 1832. It investigates how print circulated information in a multitude of sizes and media, through an evolving framework of transactions. The authority of print is demonstrated by studies of prospectuses, blank forms, periodicals, pamphlets, globes, games and ephemera, uniquely gathered in eleven essays engaging in legal, economic, literary, and historical methodologies. The tight focus on material format reappraises a disorderly market accommodating a widening audience consumption.
"Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodities history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local a...
This book recounts the story of Florentine Ariosto Jones, who after the Civil War decided to manufacture watches. Combining the cheap labor available at the time in Switzerland with US manufacturing technologies, Jones embarked on his venture to produce affordable watches for the American market. Consequently, he became a pioneer in the business of outsourcing labor for economic purposes through his contracting of labor to Europe. While the company still exists today, very little is known about Jones. The present book will undoubtedly change this by telling the fascinating story of an American adventurer and his pursuit to globalize American watchmaking at the end of the 19th Century.