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Despite their apparent simplicity, the behaviour of pendulums can be remarkably complicated. Historically, pendulums for specific purposes have been developed using a combination of simplified theory and trial and error. There do not appear to be any introductory books on pendulums, written at an intermediate level, and covering a wide range of topics. This book aims to fill the gap. It is written for readers with some background in elementary geometry, algebra, trigonometry and calculus. Historical information, where available and useful for the understanding of various types of pendulum and their applications, is included. Perhaps the best known use of pendulums is as the basis of clocks i...
How an antisemitic legend gave voice to widespread fears surrounding the expansion of private credit in Western capitalism The Promise and Peril of Credit takes an incisive look at pivotal episodes in the West’s centuries-long struggle to define the place of private finance in the social and political order. It does so through the lens of a persistent legend about Jews and money that reflected the anxieties surrounding the rise of impersonal credit markets. By the close of the Middle Ages, new and sophisticated credit instruments made it easier for European merchants to move funds across the globe. Bills of exchange were by far the most arcane of these financial innovations. Intangible and...
The Science of Conjecture provides a history of rational methods of dealing with uncertainty and explores the coming to consciousness of the human understanding of risk.
How can one study the absence of knowledge, the voids, the conscious and unconscious unknowns through history? Investigations into late medieval and early modern practices of measuring, of risk calculation, of ignorance within financial administrations, of conceiving the docta ignorantia as well as the silence of the illiterate are combined with contributions regarding knowledge gaps within identification procedures and political decision-making, with the emergence of consciously delimited blanks on geographical maps, with ignorance as a factor embedded in iconographic programs, in translation processes and the semantic potentials of reading. Based on thorough archival analysis, these selected contributions from conferences at Harvard and Paris are tightly framed by new theoretical elaborations that have implications beyond these cases and epochal focus. Contributors: Giovanni Ceccarelli, Taylor Cowdery, Lucile Haguet, John T. Hamilton, Lucian Hölscher, Moritz Isenmann, Adam J. Kosto, Marie-Laure Legay, Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Fabrice Micallef, William T. O ́Reilly, Eleonora Rohland, Mathias Schmoeckel, Daniel L. Smail, Govind P. Sreenivasan, and Cornel Zwierlein.
How did early modern societies think about disasters, such as earthquakes or floods? How did they represent disaster, and how did they intervene to mitigate its destructive effects? This collection showcases the breadth of new work on the period ca. 1300-1750. Covering topics that range from new thinking about risk and securitisation to the protection of dikes from shipworm, and with a geography that extends from Europe to Spanish America, the volume places early modern disaster studies squarely at the intersection of intellectual, cultural and socio-economic history. This period witnessed fresh speculation on nature, the diffusion of disaster narratives and imagery and unprecedented attempts to control the physical world. The book will be essential to specialists and students of environmental history and disaster, as well as general readers who seek to discover how pre-industrial societies addressed some of the same foundational issues we grapple with today.
Insurance is a legal, an actuarial and a financial product, and it is one out of many risk management strategies. It follows that its history can only be studied in the broader context of the development of such strategies, applying an interdisciplinary approach. The theme of the present volume is maritime risk management. After an overview over the history of insurance, the contributions to the present volume examine different maritime risk management strategies by adopting a variety of methodological approaches. Some contributions focus on normative provisions, others contrast practice with legal scholarship, or focus on the emergence of insurance companies as opposed to individual insurers. Again, other contributions give insights in marine insurance practice in specific cities or analyse insurance practice through the lens of specific insurance litigation. As to the time frame, the different contributions span from antiquity to the nineteenth century.
When Francis of Assisi started to use his family’s resources for religious purposes, his father took him to court. It was there that Francis dispossessed himself of everything and began a new life that soon inspired others to follow. Within a century, members of this Order of Friars Minor were among the first to dedicate complete treatises to discussions of buying, selling, and the whole of human exchange that is known as economics. The natural question to ask—and the one proposed here—is whether there might be a connection between the two, between Franciscan poverty and Franciscan economic thought?
Risky Markets explores a crucial moment in marine insurance history, when tools to tackle risks are in the making. It accounts for one of the earliest attempts of a specialized insurance market is carried out in Renaissance Florence.
In this book, contributors examine the many meanings of the term 'nomad' through the study of food habits. Food and beverage products have become just as nomadic as other objects, such as telephones and computers, whereas in the past only food and money were able to move about with their carriers. Food industries have seized control of this trend to make it the characteristic feature of consumption outside the home - always faster and more convenient, the just-in-time meal: 'what I want, when I want, where I want', snacks, finger food, and street food. The terms reveal the contemporary modernity and spread of food practices, but they are only modified versions of older and more uncommon forms of behavior. Mobility, in the sense of multiple forms of moving about using public or individual, and possibly intermodal, means of transport, on spatial scales and temporal rhythms which are frequent and recurring but variable, responding to professional or leisure needs, can serve as a basic premise in order to gain insight into the concept of food nomadism.