scholarly journals Loath This Growth: Sources of Sustainability in the Early Modern World

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy L. Caradonna
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Sustainability Movement

This chapter begins in the period that historians of Europe and the Atlantic world call “early modernity” (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). It could have begun in the Middle Ages, with the hunting reserves and protected forests established by European rulers in Venice and elsewhere. It could start with an analysis of indigenous societies, from Easter Island to the Maya, that failed to live sustainably and eventually collapsed. It could even begin in antiquity, with Pliny the Elder and his encyclopedic Natural History that tells us so much about Roman conceptions of the natural world. But we begin in the early modern period because of the clear linkages between the modern sustainability movement of the twenty-first century and the consciousness and practices that developed in early modernity. After all, the concept of “sustainability” was given a name in the early eighteenth century by a Saxon bureaucrat who coined the term “Nachhaltigkeit” to describe the practice of harvesting timber continuously from the same forest. Indeed, sustained yield forestry took shape at this time not only in Western Europe but also in Japan, around other parts of Asia, and on colonial islands in both the West and East Indies. The practice of exploiting forests sustainably was but one indication of an incipient awareness about the value of living within biophysical limits and the need to counteract resource overconsumption. Many documents that survive from this period demonstrate that it was possible to have at least a rudimentary idea about the complex relationship between social well-being, the economy, and the natural world. That is, the “systems thinking” of sustainability—the method of studying complex, interrelated systems—clearly has roots that stretch back to this largely pre-industrialized world. In 1700, the global population of homo sapiens was somewhere between 600 million and 650 million. Beijing might have approached a population of 1 million, which would have constituted a megacity at the time, but most “cities” had fewer than 50,000 inhabitants.

Apocalypticism and Globalization in the Early Modern World: A Medievalist’s Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Rubenstein
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Belief Systems ◽  
World History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Age Of Discovery ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract The apocalyptic belief systems from early modernity discussed in this series of articles to varying degrees have precursors in the Middle Ages. The drive to map the globe for purposes both geographic and symbolic, finds expression in explicitly apocalyptic manuscripts produced throughout the Middle Ages. An apocalyptic political discourse, especially centered on themes of empire and Islam, developed in the seventh century and reached extraordinary popularity during the Crusades. Speculation about the end of world history among medieval intellectuals led them not to reject the natural world but to study it more closely, in ways that set the stage for the later Age of Discovery. These broad continuities between the medieval and early modern, and indeed into modernity, demonstrate the imperative of viewing apocalypticism not as an esoteric fringe movement but as a constructive force in cultural creation.

Iqbal, Bergson and the Reconstruction of the Divine Nexus in Political Thought

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. C. Hillier
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Henri Bergson ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Realities

This chapter looks at the reconstruction of the divine nexus in political thought in Muhammad Iqbal and Henri Bergson. Articulated in Mark Lilla's book Stillborn God (2007), the divine nexus — that is, the intersection of God, man, and the world — in Western political thought was abandoned in the early modern period and no thinker has effectively re-conceptualised it since. The chapter argues that through their shared metaphysical and epistemological ideas, Iqbal and Bergson form a new philosophical foundation that puts God at the centre of the cosmos. In this, both identify the centrality of prophecy/mysticism in the collective life of society and show the indispensable role that religion plays in challenging those political realities in the world that threaten human dignity, freedom, and well-being.

Motherhood

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia Yonemoto
Keyword(s):  
Family Planning ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Two Dimensions ◽  
Low Fertility ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range

The chapter explores the discourse and experience of motherhood within Japan’s low-fertility regime in the early modern period. In a manner rarely seen elsewhere in the early modern world, Japanese families used various means, from infanticide to adoption, to correlate family size with income. The chapter examines a wide range of primary sources to explore the effects of family planning on motherhood in two dimensions, the biological and the social. It also examines motherhood as a lived experience through the writings of Inoue Tsūjo, Kuroda Tosako, and Sekiguchi Chie.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Long
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Knowledge Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Modern Era

In the early modern world, exceptional bodies are linked to knowledge, not as the production of knowledge of the self through the scrutiny of those who have been ‘othered’, but as a means of inducing self-scrutiny and awareness of the limitations of human understanding. Exceptional beings and phenomena entice us to consider the world beyond that which is familiar to us and raise questions concerning our knowledge systems based on notions of what is natural or, in our modern era, normal. Rather than reacting with horror, disgust or pity, we can learn to respect the variety, mobility and resilience of the natural world in our contemplation of that which we see as exceptional.

Social science, history of philosophy of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter T. Manicas
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Human Science ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Conventional View ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
History Of

The history of social science can conveniently be divided into four uneven periods, starting with the beginnings of both western science and philosophy in the ancient Greek polis (city or state). It is fair to say, with qualifications, that the debate generated by the so-called Sophists, professional teachers of rhetoric in fifth-century Athens, established what would become the central questions for the future. The fundamental issue could be put thus: is society ‘natural’ or is it ‘conventional’, a historical product of human activities which vary across time and space? The Sophists, often abused in our standard histories, supported the conventional view. They held that even if it was anthropologically necessary that Homo sapiens live in societies, nature was silent about the character and ends of society. They thus defended what might be called ‘cultural relativism’. By contrast Aristotle argued that some men were ‘naturally’ slaves and that all women were ‘naturally’ inferior; therefore slavery and patriarchy were dictated by nature, a view that prevailed well into the early modern period. Beginning in the sixteenth century we find a host of thinkers who reconceived the problem first raised by the Sophists. Many of them, for example, Hobbes, Rousseau and Adam Smith, held that ‘by nature’ humans had similar capacities and powers. Inequalities of power were ‘artificial’, wholly the result of historically established conventions. These writers also rejected the idea that society was a kind of natural community. For many of them, society existed by consent, the result of a contract. The rejection of Aristotelianism was inspired by the Copernican revolution and the new physics of Galileo and Newton. This produced a self-conscious effort by early modern writers to articulate the idea of human science, modelled on the new physics. This critical idea was well put by the physiocrat Francois Quesnay: ‘All social facts are linked together in the bond of eternal, immutable, ineluctable, inevitable laws, which individuals and government would obey if they were once known to them’ (Randall 1940: 323). The third period, roughly the nineteenth century, is then a battleground over both the idea of science and the idea of a human science. The paradigm provided by celestial mechanics was nearly overwhelming; even so, there was disagreement as regards its character, especially as regards the question of causality and explanation. Until very recently, ‘positivists’ have tended to prevail. That is, writers have followed Auguste Comte, who gave us the terms ‘positivism’ and ‘sociology’, and who held there were social laws which were to be analysed as ‘relations of invariable succession’: whenever this, then that. As regards the possibility of a human science, consciousness and the problem of a free will raised the biggest questions. Materialists found nothing special about either; idealists did. Indeed a surprising amount of the most recent debates in the philosophy of the social sciences have their roots in these issues. If, as positivists insist, activity is governed by law, then what of human freedom? On the other hand, if humans have collectively made society and thus can remake it, then what is the nature of a human science?

Death and Dying

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Covington
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Death And Dying ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Dead

Beliefs and practices relating to death underwent profound transformations in the early modern period and continue to provoke the interest of widely disparate scholars. Once the purview of demographic, medical, and social historians, the subject of death and dying has also been given literary and art historical treatments as well as treatment from a range of other interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives. As Philippe Ariès once noted, if the historian (and one might add the student) “wishes to arrive at an understanding” of what death meant in the past, he or she must “widen his field of vision” to encompass different historical approaches and methodologies—and even then the subject still eludes. (Ariès 1981, p. 16–17; cited under Attitudes and Mentalities). No study of death’s history can escape the shadow of Ariès, even if his two works relating to the theme of death have been criticized for the selectivity of their sources and sweeping conclusions about collective beliefs. But as with many such ambitious and problematic works—Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias are others whose field-changing books come to mind—the influence has been enormous. Working from the perspective of social history and the Annales school of French historians, Ariès tended to focus primarily on the cultural and attitudinal aspects of death, with most of the books in this article reflecting this approach. But the biomedical and demographic aspects are also important, particularly in the context of an age that witnessed a revolution in professionalized medicine and, according to many scholars, resulted in the medicalization and eventually the “secularization” of death. Historians have also been influenced by the contributions of anthropologists, such as Jack Goody on ritual, Victor Turner on liminality, and Arnold Van Gennep on rites de passage (rituals marking the life cycle), all of whom have deepened understandings of the very different approaches to death that people held in the premodern past. Many practitioners of “historical anthropology” thus explored cultural practices and collectively held symbolic systems, each of which carried extensive implications for the study of funerary rites, burial customs, or rituals of remembrance. Indeed, the anthropologist Robert Hertz made such endeavors possible in his own work on funerary rituals and the psychological connections between the living and the dead or between the individual and the community. Such perspectives were also animated by a related turn in the study of memory, with such notable exponents as Pierre Nora and his “sites of memory”; as a result the use of tradition and commemorative ritual as well as an interest in epigraphs and tomb monuments has been applied to the memorializing of the dead with productive results. Most of the sections in this article select works that reflect these different theoretical approaches as they describe how death in the early modern world was an intimate fact of life and one that was confronted communally and with a common, consolatory language and set of rituals, all of which was a healthier way, perhaps, to face death than the medicalized isolation that often surrounds it in the early 21st century.

Economic Conditions in Early Modern Bengal: A Contribution to the Divergence Debate

2010 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Income Growth ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Average Income ◽  
European Colonization

This article contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that in contemporary Western Europe, and (b) there is insufficient basis to infer either growth or decline in average income in the eighteenth century.

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