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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.
This volume examines the rise of the many different trading empires from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.
This book focuses on why Europe became the dominant economic force in global trade between 1450 and 1750.
In this widely praised history, noted scholar James D. Tracy offers a comprehensive, lucid, and masterful exploration of early modern Europe's key turning point. Establishing a new standard for histories of the Reformation, Tracy explores the complex religious, political, and social processes that made change possible, even as he synthesizes new understandings of the profound continuities between medieval Catholic Europe and the multi-confessional sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This revised edition includes new material on Eastern Europe, on how ordinary people experienced religious change, and on the pluralistic societies that began to emerge. Reformation scholars have in recent decad...
"Tracy's 'life and times' approach results in a considerably deeper understanding on the part of the reader of what sparked Erasmus's works, and of their intent."--Elisabeth G. Gleason, University of San Francisco "This sensitive and well-researched intellectual biography of Erasmus, situating him in his political and cultural milieu . . . contributes to a new understanding of Erasmian texts."--Erika Rummel, Wilfrid Laurier University "Tracy's 'life and times' approach results in a considerably deeper understanding on the part of the reader of what sparked Erasmus's works, and of their intent."--Elisabeth G. Gleason, University of San Francisco
Table of contents
Under what conditions were limited forms of self-government possible in medieval and early modern Europe? While many historians have sought an answer by investigating the development of parliamentary institutions in emerging national monarchies and the wider autonomy enjoyed by various city-states within their own borders, James D. Tracy concentrates instead on a relatively neglected phenomenon at an intermediate level of political organization—the self-governing province. Focusing on the province of Holland during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II (1506–1566), Tracy argues convincingly that Holland effectively underwent an apprenticeship in self-government. The seven provinces of th...
Distinguished scholar James D. Tracy shows how the Ottoman advance across Europe stalled in the western Balkans, where three great powers confronted one another in three adjoining provinces: Habsburg Croatia, Ottoman Bosnia, and Venetian Dalmatia. Until about 1580, Bosnia was a platform for Ottoman expansion, and Croatia steadily lost territory, while Venice focused on protecting the Dalmatian harbors vital for its trade with the Ottoman east. But as Habsburg-Austrian elites coalesced behind military reforms, they stabilized Croatia’s frontier, while Bosnia shifted its attention to trade, and Habsburg raiders crossing Dalmatia heightened tensions with Venice. The period ended with a long i...
In 1572, towns in the province of Holland, led by William of Orange, rebelled against the government of the Habsburg Netherlands. The story of the Dutch Revolt is usually told in terms of fractious provinces that frustrated Orange's efforts to formulate a coherent programme. In this book James D. Tracy argues that there was a coherent strategy for the war, but that it was set by the towns of Holland. Although the States of Holland were in theory subject to the States General, Holland provided over 60 per cent of the taxes and an even larger share of war loans. Accordingly, funds were directed to securing Holland's borders, and subsequently to extending this protected frontier to neighbouring...
The essays presented in this volume, first published in 2000, describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilisation of manpower and resources needed to build them favoured some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Previous collective volumes on the subject have dealt mainly with Europe, but the historians and art historians who collaborate here follow a comparative agenda. The millennial practice of wall building that branched out from the ancient Near East into India, Europe, and North Africa shows continuities and points of contact of which the makers of urban fortifications were scarcely aware; separate traditions in China, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.