scholarly journals Digging down into the global urban past

Urban History ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Emma Hart ◽  
Mariana Dantas

Abstract In our introduction to this Special Issue on early modern cities and globalization, we explore the current place of cities before 1850 in global urban history and address the promise of a greater focus on their role. We argue that the interplay between the large scale and the small scale in the imperial global city is an essential dialogical force in the formation of each city's relationship to the wider early modern world. Furthermore, early modern global urban history can help explain the creation of spaces that facilitated connections between distant, global locations, as well as illuminate the emergence of networks of exchange between city communities around the globe. Yet, it also reveals the tense, messy negotiation of the meaning of these urban spaces, as well as the incredibly diverse communities they harboured.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Choon Hwee Koh

Prevailing historiography views the use of contractors by states as indicative of a loss or decentralization of power. This article takes the case of the Ottoman postmaster to demonstrate how contracting could in fact strengthen early modern empires and to argue that the binary spatial metaphors of ‘centralization’ and ‘decentralization’ cannot adequately explain how power worked in the early modern world (about 1500–1800). Indeed, recent scholarship has highlighted the scale and significance of military contractors in early modern European warfare. However, contractors were not confined to expanding military capacity; they were also employed to expand administrative capacity in diverse arenas. Evidence from Ottoman fiscal documents and judicial registers shows how contracted postmasters played a crucial role in strengthening the imperial bureaucracy’s supervision of a sprawling postal system. In contrast to war-making, which involved the short-term mobilization of vast resources, maintaining a large-scale infrastructure required long-term co-ordination across multiple dispersed nodes, and this entailed a different spatial configuration of power that disrupts the dichotomous paradigm of centralization and decentralization. Ultimately, a holistic appraisal of early modern state-building needs to consider not just cases of war-making or provincial administration, but also pan-imperial infrastructures like information and communication systems.


Author(s):  
Molly A. Warsh

Patterns of pearl cultivation and circulation reveal vernacular practices that shaped emerging imperial ideas about value and wealth in the early modern world. Pearls’ variability and subjective beauty posed a profound challenge to the imperial impulse to order and control, underscoring the complexity of governing subjects and objects in the early modern world. Qualitative, evaluative language would play a prominent role in crown officials’ attempts to contain and channel this complexity. The book’s title reflects the evolving significance of the term barrueca (which became “baroque” in English), a word initially employed in the Venezuelan fisheries to describe irregular pearls. Over time, this term lost its close association with the jewel but came to serve as a metaphor for irregular, unbounded expression. Pearls’ enduring importance lies less in the revenue they generated than in the conversations they prompted about the nature of value and the importance of individual skill and judgment, as well as the natural world, in its creation and husbandry. The stories generated by pearls—an unusual, organic jewel—range globally, crossing geographic and imperial boundaries as well as moving across scales, linking the bounded experiences of individuals to the expansion of imperial bureaucracies. These microhistories illuminate the connections between these small- and large-scale historical processes, revealing the connections between empire as envisioned by monarchs, enacted in law, and experienced at sea and on the ground by individuals.


Urban History ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-9
Author(s):  
ERIKA HANNA ◽  
RICHARD BUTLER

Modern Irish history is urban history. It is a story of the transferral of a populace from rural settlements to small towns and cities; of the discipline and regulation of society through new urban spaces; of the creation of capital through the construction of buildings and the sale of property. The history of Ireland has been overwhelmingly the history of land, but too often the emphasis has been on the field rather than the street, and on the small farmer instead of the urban shopkeeper. But the same questions of property run throughout Irish urban history from the early modern period to the contemporary, as speculators, businesses and government have attempted to convert land into profit, creating new buildings, streets and spaces, and coming into conflict with each other and other vested interests. Indeed, as recent work on Irish cities has shown, a turn to the urban history of Ireland provides a framework and a methodology for writing a textured and complex history of Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Gerbner ◽  
Karin Vélez

Missionaries were often the most prolific writers on non-European peoples and cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. As a result, their sources have proven to be indispensable for early modernists. For decades, historians have explored missionary encounters and the sources they inspired to gain insight into a wide variety of topics including native history, the history of religion, labor history, environmental history, the history of the African diaspora, and the history of capitalism. While missionary sources are used widely, most scholarship on the encounters themselves focuses on either a particular denomination or a particular region. Rarely is the surprisingly cohesive barrier between Protestant and Catholic missions breached within single volumes or monographs. This special issue seeks to break down these divides. By making inter-denominational and inter-imperial connections, this volume asks new questions about the meaning of missionary encounters in the early modern world.


2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 561-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
FREYJA COX JENSEN

AbstractThe histories of ancient Greece and Rome are part of a shared European heritage, and a foundation for many modern Western social and cultural traditions. Their printing and circulation during the Renaissance helped to shape the identities of individual nations, and create different reading publics. Yet we still lack a comprehensive understanding of the forms in which works of Greek and Roman history were published in the first centuries of the handpress age, the relationship between the ideas contained within these texts and the books as material objects, and thus the precise nature of the changes they effected in early modern European culture and society. This article provides the groundwork for a reassessment of the place of ancient history in the early modern world. Using new, digital resources to reappraise existing scholarship, it offers a fresh evaluation of the publication of the ancient historians from the inception of print to 1600, revealing important differences that alter our understanding of particular authors, texts, and trends, and suggesting directions for further research. It also models the research possibilities of large-scale digital catalogues and databases, and highlights the possibilities (and pitfalls) of these resources.


2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-398
Author(s):  
Roger Smith
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Evi Rahmawati ◽  
Irnin Agustina Dwi Astuti ◽  
N Nurhayati

IPA Integrated is a place for students to study themselves and the surrounding environment applied in daily life. Integrated IPA Learning provides a direct experience to students through the use and development of scientific skills and attitudes. The importance of integrated IPA requires to pack learning well, integrated IPA integration with the preparation of modules combined with learning strategy can maximize the learning process in school. In SMP 209 Jakarta, the value of the integrated IPA is obtained from 34 students there are 10 students completed and 24 students are not complete because they get the value below the KKM of 68. This research is a development study with the development model of ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation). The use of KPS-based integrated IPA modules (Science Process sSkills) on the theme of rainbow phenomenon obtained by media expert validation results with an average score of 84.38%, average material expert 82.18%, average linguist 75.37%. So the average of all aspects obtained by 80.55% is worth using and tested to students. The results of the teacher response obtained 88.69% value with excellent criteria. Student responses on a small scale acquired an average score of 85.19% with highly agreed criteria and on the large-scale student response gained a yield of 86.44% with very agreed criteria. So the module can be concluded receiving a good response by the teacher and students.


1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve King

Re-creating the social, economic and demographic life-cycles of ordinary people is one way in which historians might engage with the complex continuities and changes which underlay the development of early modern communities. Little, however, has been written on the ways in which historians might deploy computers, rather than card indexes, to the task of identifying such life cycles from the jumble of the sources generated by local and national administration. This article suggests that multiple-source linkage is central to historical and demographic analysis, and reviews, in broad outline, some of the procedures adopted in a study which aims at large scale life cycle reconstruction.


Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl

This book provides a sweeping critical history of social theories about war and peace from Thomas Hobbes to the present. It presents both a broad intellectual history and an original argument as it traces the development of thinking about war over more than 350 years—from the premodern era to the period of German idealism and the Scottish and French enlightenments, and then from the birth of sociology in the nineteenth century through the twentieth century. While focusing on social thought, the book draws on many disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, and political science. It demonstrate the profound difficulties most social thinkers—including liberals, socialists, and those intellectuals who could be regarded as the first sociologists—had in coming to terms with the phenomenon of war, the most obvious form of large-scale social violence. With only a few exceptions, these thinkers, who believed deeply in social progress, were unable to account for war because they regarded it as marginal or archaic, and on the verge of disappearing. This overly optimistic picture of the modern world persisted in social theory even in the twentieth century, as most sociologists and social theorists either ignored war and violence in their theoretical work or tried to explain it away. The failure of the social sciences and especially sociology to understand war, the book argues, must be seen as one of the greatest weaknesses of disciplines that claim to give a convincing diagnosis of our times.


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