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In The Sun King’s Atlantic, Jutta Wimmler reveals the many surprising ways in which the Atlantic world channeled cultural developments during the age of the Sun King. Although hardly visible for contemporaries at the time, Africa and America were omnipresent throughout early modern France: in the textile industry, pharmaceutics, medicine, scientific methods, religious discourse, and court theatre. The book moves beyond typical plantation crops and the slave trade to illustrate how a focus on Europe challenges us to rethink the place of Africa in the early modern world.
While the economic involvement of early modern Germany in slavery and the slave trade is increasingly receiving attention, the direct participation of Germans in human trafficking remains a blind spot in historiography. This edited volume focuses on practices of enslavement taking place within German territories in the early modern period as well as on the people of African, Asian, and Native American descent caught up in them.
This book focuses on the significant role of West African consumers in the development of the global economy. It explores their demand for Indian cotton textiles and how their consumption shaped patterns of global trade, influencing economies and businesses from Western Europe to South Asia. In turn, the book examines how cotton textile production in southern India responded to this demand. Through this perspective of a south-south economic history, the study foregrounds African agency and considers the lasting impact on production and exports in South Asia. It also considers how European commercial and imperial expansion provided a complex web of networks, linking West African consumers and Indian weavers. Crucially, it demonstrates the emergence of the modern global economy.
Why did it seem strange when Battlestar Galactica ended its narrative on a religious note instead of providing a scientific explanation? And what does this have to do with gender? This book explores the connection between the triumph of religion and the dominance of femininity in Battlestar Galactica and its prequel series Caprica. Both series breached science fiction's convention of representing the "irrationality" of femininity and religion. Analyzing the connections (and disconnections) between women and men, and theology and technology, the author argues that the "Battlestarverse" depicts women as zones of contact between the seemingly contradictory spheres of science and religion by simultaneously employing and breaking gender stereotypes.
An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor. The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in...
In this vivid and highly original reading of recent Chinese history, Xuelei Huang documents the eclectic array of smells that permeated Chinese life from the High Qing through to the Mao period. Utilising interdisciplinary methodology and critically engaging with scholarship in the expanding fields of sensory and smell studies, she shows how this period of tumultuous change in China was experienced through the body and the senses. Drawing on unexplored archival materials, readers are introduced to the 'smellscapes' of China from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century via perfumes, food, body odours, public health projects, consumerism and cosmetics, travel literature, fiction and political language. This pioneering and evocative study takes the reader on a sensory journey through modern Chinese history, examining the ways in which the experience of scent and modernity have intertwined.
Traces the development of German civil society through collective actions of honor
Examines the culture and conduct of six small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in England and West Germany from 1945 to the late-1970s, drawing on numerous archives in Germany and Britain. This is the first book length study that examines the detailed histories of SMEs in a comparative, transnational manner. Emerging from this study is an evaluation of German and British varieties of capitalism in action, showing that they were not fixed or static, but rather have changed considerably as they evolved over time. The German companies studied formed part of the Mittelstand, the family-owned sector which is unique to German-speaking countries. This book explores whether the principles of a cl...