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The Summits of Modern Man
Mountaineering has served as a metaphor for civilization triumphant. A fascinating study of the first ascents of the major Alpine peaks and Mt. Everest, The Summits of Modern Man reveals the significance of our encounters with the world’s most forbidding heights and how difficult it is to imagine nature in terms other than conquest and domination.
A Laboratory of Liberty
Based on a tradition of political innovation, Swiss citizens recalibrated their understanding of liberty and republicanism through public political debates, during the revolutionary transformation to a rights-based society. The resulting hybrid political culture enhances our understanding of the international Age of Revolution.
The Corsairs’ Longest Voyage
During the summer of 1627, corsairs from Algiers and Salé, Morocco, undertook the long voyage to Iceland where they raided the eastern and southern regions of the country, resulting in the deaths of around thirty people, and capturing about 400 further individuals who were sold on the slave markets. Around 10% of the captives were ransomed the next twenty years, mostly through the efforts of the Danish monarchy. In this volume, the history of these extraordinary events and their long-lasting memory are traced and analysed from the viewpoints of maritime warfare, cultural encounters and existential options, based on extensive use of various sources from several languages.
Creolised Science
This rich, deeply researched study offers the first comprehensive exploration of cross-cultural plant knowledge in eighteenth-century Mauritius. Using the concept of creolisation – the process by which elements of different cultures are brought together to create entangled and evolving new entities – Brixius examines the production of knowledge on an island without long-established traditions of botany as understood by Europeans. Once foreign plants and knowledge arrived in Mauritius, they were adapted to new environmental circumstances and a new socio-cultural space. Brixius explores how French colonists, settlers, mediators, labourers and enslaved people experienced and shaped the island's botanical past, centring the contributions of subaltern actors. By foregrounding neglected non-European actors from both Africa and Asia, within a melting pot of cultivation traditions from around the world, she presents a truly global history of botanical knowledge.
Leibniz in His World
A sweeping intellectual biography that restores the Enlightenment polymath to the intellectual, scientific, and courtly worlds that shaped his early life and thought Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist and courtier navigating the learned and courtly circles of early modern Europe and the Republic of Letters. Drawing on extensive corresponde...
Natural Disaster at the Closing of the Dutch Golden Age
An environmental history of natural disasters during the eighteenth-century decline of the Dutch Republic.
Market and Violence
** Winner of the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023. ** Despite their many disagreements when it comes to the subject of capitalism, Marxist and market-liberal approaches seem to agree about one thing: the economic structures of capitalist market society have made direct violence against the person not only superfluous, but economically counterproductive. Heide Gerstenberger's Market and Violence does not contest the thesis that there has been, in many places, a decline in the use of violence in the pursuit of profit; but it demolishes the assumption that this can be put down to the evolution of economic rationality. By means of a deep engagement with the concrete historical reality of capitalist economies, Gerstenberger establishes that, wherever capitalism has been tamed, this has been achieved only by a combination of energetic social contestation and political intervention. First published in German in 2018, the present English-language edition makes a sweeping history of capitalist violence by one of the preeminent theorists of capitalist society working today available to a wider readership.
Discovering the Ice Ages
Tobias Krüger explores the discovery of the Ice Ages, how the idea was received, and what further research it stimulated. The approach used in Discovering the Ice Ages is uniquely sweeping. The contemporary debates on the subject are compared from an international perspective. Krüger retraces the arguments advanced from the middle of the 18th century to the threshold of the 20th century. The positions held by defenders of the glacial theory as well as those by its most important opponents are set within the context of the then current understanding of geology. In an interdisciplinary overview Krüger then focuses on the impetus gained from early ice-age research. The most prominent examples worth mentioning are the discovery of trace gases and the greenhouse effect.
Biophotonics
An account of a three-year research program funded by the German government, in which physicists and physical chemists set off together with biologists and physicians to develop new techniques for medical and biological problems and ended up with sophisticated scientific solutions and innovative equipment, partly ready for the market. It not only includes a concise description of the new discoveries but also offers also an introduction to the various fields within optics.
