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In Navigating History: Economy, Society, Knowledge, and Nature the contributors present new research that touches on the core themes developed in Karel Davids’s work. The book reflects Davids’s omnivorous character as a scholar. Nevertheless, there are common strands that run throughout the introduction and fourteen chapters gathered here. Major themes include resources of knowledge, cultures of learning, and humans and their natural environment. Together, these fourteen essays provide a fascinating panorama of social, economic, and environmental history of the past millennium. The book seeks to bring back the different levels of geographical scope, fusing the local, the national and the global. Contributors are: Ulbe Bosma, Pepijn Brandon, Jaap Bruijn, Petra van Dam, Victor Enthoven, Sabine Go, Marjolein ’t Hart, Raoul De Kerf, Jan Lucassen, Karin Lurvink, Joel Mokyr, Marijn Molema, Bert de Munck, Pál Nyiri, Harm Pieters, Matthias van Rossum, Joost Schokkenbroek, Jeroen Touwen, Wybren Verstegen, and Jan Luiten van Zanden.
In Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences Karel Davids analyses the influence of religious contexts on technological change in China and Europe between c.700 and 1800.
A 1996 comparative study of the Netherlands from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.
In The Chinese Atlantic, Sean Metzger charts processes of global circulation across and beyond the Atlantic, exploring how seascapes generate new understandings of Chinese migration, financial networks and artistic production. Moving across film, painting, performance, and installation art, Metzger traces flows of money, culture, and aesthetics to reveal the ways in which routes of commerce stretching back to the Dutch Golden Age have molded and continue to influence the social reproduction of Chineseness. With a particular focus on the Caribbean, Metzger investigates the expressive culture of Chinese migrants and the communities that received these waves of people. He interrogates central i...
A new economic history of the largest institution for the production of human capital in the premodern economy: apprenticeship. Apprenticeship dominated skill formation from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution. Years spent training with a skilled master were a nearly universal experience for young workers in crafts and trade. Apprenticeship is seen by some as a key ingredient in the emergence of modern growth. To others, it was inflexible and conservative. Analyzing the records of hundreds of thousands of individual apprenticeships between 1500 and 1800, The Market for Skill tells the story of how apprenticeship worked and the way it fuelled economic growth in England. Patrick Walli...
Comparative urban history examines early modern economic and cultural achievements in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London.
This book studies the Dutch mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620) as a new type of ‘man of knowledge’. Traditionally, Stevin is best known for his contributions to the ‘Archimedean turn’. This innovative volume moves beyond this conventional image by bringing many other aspects of his work into view, by analysing the connections between the multiple strands of his thinking and by situating him in a broader European context. Like other multi-talents (‘polymaths’) in his time (several of whom are discussed in this volume), Stevin made an important contribution to the transformation of the ideal of knowledge in early modern Europe. This book thus provides new insights into the phenomenon of ‘polymaths’ in general and in the case of Stevin in particular.
The contributions contained in this volume address a variety of topics related to the history of education and learning in the Netherlands during the crucial period of transition between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. With contributions by Hildo van Engen, Antheun Janse, Mario Damen, Madelon van Luijk, Arnoud-Jan A. Bijsterveld, Jaap van Moolenbroek, Ad Tervoort, Koen Goudriaan, Bart Ramakers, Arjan van Dixhoorn, Marijke Spies, Karel Davids, Sabrina Corbellini, Gerrit Verhoeven, Peter van Dael, Samme Zijlstra, Ilja M. Veldman.
The Dutch Republic was the most religiously diverse land in early modern Europe, gaining an international reputation for toleration. In Reformation and the Practice of Toleration, Benjamin Kaplan explains why the Protestant Reformation had this outcome in the Netherlands and how people of different faiths managed subsequently to live together peacefully. Bringing together fourteen essays by the author, the book examines the opposition of so-called Libertines to the aspirations of Calvinist reformers for uniformity and discipline. It analyzes the practical arrangements by which multiple religious groups were accommodated. It traces the dynamics of religious life in Utrecht and other mixed communities. And it explores the relationships that developed between people of different faiths, especially in ‘mixed’ marriages.
For a long time guilds have been condemned as a major obstacle to economic progress in the pre-industrial era. This re-examination of the role of guilds in the early modern European economy challenges that view by taking into account fresh research on innovation, technological change and entrepreneurship. Leading economic historians argue that industry before the Industrial Revolution was much more innovative than previous studies have allowed for and explore the different products and production techniques that were launched and developed in this period. Much of this innovation was fostered by the craft guilds that formed the backbone of industrial production before the rise of the steam engine. The book traces the manifold ways in which guilds in a variety of industries in Italy, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain helped to create an institutional environment conducive to technological and marketing innovations.