scholarly journals Consumption, Consumerism, and Japanese Modernity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
Global Study ◽  
New Goods ◽  
Post War

The experience of people in Japan offers a rich body of evidence for a comparative and global study of consumption from early modern, through modern times, and to the postmodern period. One finds ample grist for the mill of economic historians seeking to measure the extent and the shifts in consumption of all manner of goods and services. One also finds sources in abundance from the seventeenth century onwards speaking to the politics and culture of regulating, lamenting, and celebrating consumption. Building on early modern foundations, consumption expanded in the era of self-conscious modernization that followed the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate (1868), with a turn to new goods alongside more widespread use of customary ones. As this happened, attitudes in Japan evolved as part of a global dialogue on consumer life. This article explores consumption, consumerism, modernity, and the post-war ascendance of consumers in Japan.

Protestant Rivalry — Metaphysics and Rhetoric in Germany c. 1590–1620

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
The Middle Ages

One of the most remarkable changes to take place at German Protestant universities during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first twenty years of the seventeenth century was the return of metaphysics after more than halfa century of absence. University metaphysics has acquired a reputation for sterile aridity which was strengthened rather than diminished by its survival in early modern times, when such disciplines are supposed deservedly to have vanished with the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this survival has attracted some attention this century. For a long urne it was assumed that German Protestants needed a metaphysical defence against the intellectual vigour of the Jesuits. Lewalter has shown, however, that this was not the case.

Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. I. The matter of Bitu

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivor Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Trade Agreements ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The World ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Late Fifteenth

In late medieval and early modern times West Africa was one of the principal suppliers of gold to the world bullion market. In this context the Matter of Bitu is one of much importance. Bitu lay on the frontiers of the Malian world and was one of its most flourishing gold marts. So much is clear from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings, both African and European. A review of this body of evidence indicates that the gold trade at Bitu was controlled by the Wangara, who played a central role in organizing trade between the Akan goldfields and the towns of the Western Sudan. It is shown that Bitu cannot be other than Bighu (Begho, Bew, etc.), the abandoned Wangara town lying on the northwestern fringes of the Akan forest country, which is known (from excavation) to have flourished in the relevant period. In the late fifteenth century the Portuguese established posts on the southern shores of the Akan country, so challenging the monopolistic position which the Wangara had hitherto enjoyed in the gold trade. The Portuguese sent envoys to Mali, presumably to negotiate trade agreements. The bid was apparently unsuccessful. The struggle for the Akan trade in the sixteenth century between Portuguese and Malian interests will be treated in the second part of this paper.

scholarly journals Comparing Comparisons in Muslim Polemical Writings from Christian Iberia and Exile: Muḥammad al-Qaysī’s Kitāb Miftāḥ al-Dīn and the Anonymous Tratado de los dos caminos

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mònica Colominas Aparicio
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Current Knowledge ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Arabic Characters ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Historical Practice

Comparison figures prominently in the polemics of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula in premodern and early modern times. Its pervasiveness as a figure of thought in their sources raises the question of variety in regard to comparison—that is, the multiple expressions of comparison as well as its numerous uses—particularly in the field of polemics. This paper discusses the functions of comparison in polemics as a necessary first step to advance current knowledge of comparison as a historical practice in the making of one’s identity and the definition of groups and individuals. The discussion will focus on writings by Muslims who lived in Christian Iberia. It will focus particularly on two anti-Christian polemics: that by the Tunisian author Muḥammad al-Qaysī in an as-yet unstudied Aljamiado copy (Spanish in Arabic characters); and the Tratado de los dos caminos (Treatise of the Two Roads), an early-seventeenth-century work of Islamic doctrine by the so-called “Refugee in Tunisia”. The analysis of these two works will address the most important common points and differences between their respective polemical comparisons.

Buddhism in the re-ordering of an early modern world: Chinese missions to Cochinchina in the seventeenth century

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Wheeler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Monastic Communities ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
Chinese Seafarers ◽  
The Silk Road

AbstractIn the seventeenth century, Chan Buddhist masters from monasteries in South China boarded merchant ships to Chinese merchant colonies in East and Southeast Asian port cities to establish or maintain monasteries. Typically, Chinese seafarers and merchants sponsored their travel, and sovereigns and elites abroad offered their patronage. What were these monks and their patrons seeking? This study will investigate the question through the case of one Chan master, Shilian Dashan, who journeyed to the Vietnamese kingdom of Cochinchina (Dang Trong) in 1695 and 1696. In Dashan, we see a form of Buddhism thought to have vanished with the Silk Road: that is, Buddhism as a ‘missionary religion’ able to propagate branch temples through long-distance networks of merchant colonies, and to form monastic communities within the host societies that welcomed them. This evident agency of seafaring Chan monks in early modern times suggests that Buddhism’s role in commerce, diaspora, and state formation in early modern maritime Asia may compare to religions like Islam and Christianity, and deserves further study.

The Later Habsburg Concept of Statecraft

1966 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 92-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Jenks
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Significant Development ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times ◽  
William Iii ◽  
The Masses

The historian of the seventeenth century who bewails the absence of a creditable biography of Louis XIV or of William III underlines a significant development of historical writing in the twentieth century. Overpowered by those who deny that biography can be history and convinced that the masses have never secured their due share of attention in early modern times, the scholar uneasily plots an investigation of underground discontent in the gilds of Colbert's day or resolutely pens an essay that destroys once and for all the idea that the workers of France admired Napoleon. Meanwhile, in classes which race from Petrarch to Waterloo, the scholar turned teacher admits that there actually were an age of absolutism and an age of enlightened despotism, for the royal touch is inescapable.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Divine Machines

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Theoretical Interest ◽  
Living World ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Generation Theory

Though it did not yet exist as a discrete field of scientific inquiry, biology was at the heart of many of the most important debates in seventeenth-century philosophy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of G. W. Leibniz. This book offers the first in-depth examination of Leibniz's deep and complex engagement with the empirical life sciences of his day, in areas as diverse as medicine, physiology, taxonomy, generation theory, and paleontology. The book shows how these wide-ranging pursuits were not only central to Leibniz's philosophical interests, but often provided the insights that led to some of his best-known philosophical doctrines. Presenting the clearest picture yet of the scope of Leibniz's theoretical interest in the life sciences, the book takes seriously the philosopher's own repeated claims that the world must be understood in fundamentally biological terms. Here it reveals a thinker who was immersed in the sciences of life, and looked to the living world for answers to vexing metaphysical problems. The book casts Leibniz's philosophy in an entirely new light, demonstrating how it radically departed from the prevailing models of mechanical philosophy and had an enduring influence on the history and development of the life sciences. Along the way, the book provides a fascinating glimpse into early modern debates about the nature and origins of organic life, and into how philosophers such as Leibniz engaged with the scientific dilemmas of their era.

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