Conclusion

Author(s):  
Jonathan Israel

This concluding chapter assesses what the contribution of the Jews was to seventeenth-century European civilization. It is reasonably clear that the general significance of the Jews has to be assessed under two main heads — the economic and the cultural. The problem is to specify the exact nature of the Jewish role. The techniques of Jewish commerce and finance did not differ from other commerce and finance except in that a vast array of restrictions cut the Jews out of most guilds, most retail trade, and the ownership of land and buildings. The key factor which imparted a certain importance to the post-1570 Jewish role was the simultaneous penetration during the sixteenth century of both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, as well as of the Marranos living in Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, into maritime and overland long-distance transit trades linking the Levant with Italy, Poland with the Levant, Poland with Germany, and Portugal and the Portuguese Empire with northern Europe. The commercial importance gained by the Jews in the Levant and Poland, largely as a result of the previous expulsion from the West, in other words, formed the basis of the Jewish revival in Italy, Germany, Bohemia–Moravia, and the Low Countries after 1570. This entrenched position in so many crucial but distant markets proved a factor of great potency, especially in view of the close correspondence and intimate cultural contact between western Jewry and the Jews of the Levant and Poland.

Author(s):  
Ron Harris

Before the seventeenth century, trade across Eurasia was mostly conducted in short segments along the Silk Route and Indian Ocean. Business was organized in family firms, merchant networks, and state-owned enterprises, and dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Arabic traders. However, around 1600 the first two joint-stock corporations, the English and Dutch East India Companies, were established. This book tells the story of overland and maritime trade without Europeans, of European Cape Route trade without corporations, and of how new, large-scale, and impersonal organizations arose in Europe to control long-distance trade for more than three centuries. It shows that by 1700, the scene and methods for global trade had dramatically changed: Dutch and English merchants shepherded goods directly from China and India to northwestern Europe. To understand this transformation, the book compares the organizational forms used in four major regions: China, India, the Middle East, and Western Europe. The English and Dutch were the last to leap into Eurasian trade, and they innovated in order to compete. They raised capital from passive investors through impersonal stock markets and their joint-stock corporations deployed more capital, ships, and agents to deliver goods from their origins to consumers. The book explores the history behind a cornerstone of the modern economy, and how this organizational revolution contributed to the formation of global trade and the creation of the business corporation as a key factor in Europe's economic rise.


Author(s):  
Dries Tys

The origin, rise, and dynamics of coastal trade and landing places in the North Sea area between the sixth and eighth centuries must be understood in relation to how coastal regions and seascapes acted as arenas of contact, dialogue, and transition. Although the free coastal societies of the early medieval period were involved in regional to interregional or long-distance trade networks, their economic agency must be understood from a bottom-up perspective. That is, their reproduction strategies must be studied in their own right, independent from any teleological construction about the development of trade, markets, or towns for that matter. This means that the early medieval coastal networks of exchange were much more complex and diverse than advocated by the simple emporium network model, which connected the major archaeological sites along the North Sea coast. Instead, coastal and riverine dwellers often possessed some form of free status and large degrees of autonomy, in part due to the specific environmental conditions of the landscapes in which they dwelled. The wide estuarine region of the Low Countries, between coastal Flanders in the south and Friesland in the north, a region with vast hinterlands and a central position in northwestern Europe, makes these developments particularly clear. This chapter thus pushes back against longstanding assumptions in scholarly research, which include overemphasis of the influence of large landowners over peasant economies, and on the prioritization of easily retrievable luxuries over less visible indicators of bulk trade (such as wood, wool, and more), gift exchange, and market trade. The approach used here demonstrates that well-known emporia or larger ports of trade were embedded in the economic activities and networks of their respective hinterlands. Early medieval coastal societies and their dynamics are thus better understood from the perspective of integrated governance and economy (“new institutional economics”) in a regional setting.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Gerlach

Abstract This paper focuses on the diffusion of 無為/ wu-wei (an ancient Chinese concept of political economy) throughout Europe, between 1648 and 1848. It argues that at the core of this diffusion process were three significant developments; first, the importation and active transmission of wu-wei by the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. It is revealed that the details of Chinese expertise entered Europe via the textual diffusion of Jesuit texts and the visual diffusion of millions of so-called minben-images during the ceramic boom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, the hypothesis is advanced that the diffusion of wu-wei, co-evolved with the inner-European laissez-faire principle, the Libaniusian model. In the second part, it is shown that the intellectual foundation of Europe’s first economic school, Physiocracy, is a direct replica of the imported Chinese economic, agrarian craftsmanship of wu-wei; subsequently, it is denied that the indigenous European Libaniusian ideology can be considered the intellectual master-model of Physiocracy and his founder Quesnay. Finally, we argue that Switzerland can be identified as the first European paradigm state of wu-wei. The crystallization process of wu-wei inside Europe ultimately ended with the economic-political reorganization of the newly formed Eidgenossenschaft in 1848. The Swiss succeeded in institutionally transforming traditional Chinese agrarian wu-wei into the modern version of European “commercial wu-wei”. In due course, this alpine paradigm enabled the endogenous Libaniusian model to verify and reflect upon its theory of commercial society. Additionally, this third focus also demonstrates that the later development of Europe’s laissez-faire doctrine has to be seen as a Eurasian co-production – without importing China’s wu-wei, Europe’s pro-commercial ideology might never have matured.


2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (141) ◽  
pp. 16-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
René d’Ambrières ◽  
Éamon Ó Ciosáin

After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, hundreds of Catholic priests and religious were forced into exile on the Continent, with many seeking refuge in France, Spain and the Spanish Low Countries. For some, refuge was temporary while awaiting political developments and toleration in the home country; for others, it was permanent. The sheer numbers involved – in the hundreds (see below) – mark this as a new phenomenon in the migration of Irish Catholics to France. Although large numbers of Irish soldiers arrived there in the late 1630s and again from 1651 onwards, as Ireland was cleared of regiments connected with the Confederation of Kilkenny, the volume of priests and seminarians migrating to France had hitherto been on a much smaller scale than that of the military.


1988 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Jane A. Bernstein

Much has been written about the Italian madrigal and its effect upon the musical life of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. That the Italian vogue was indeed strong can be observed most dramatically in English printed and manuscript sources of the period; yet the obvious and dazzling effect this foreign idiom had upon many aspects of Elizabethan and Jacobean music is balanced by the equally important and more deeply-rooted connection that England enjoyed with her nearer Continental neighbours, France and the Low Countries. The following index documents this musical connection by presenting a list of the Franco-Netherlandish chansons that appeared in English manuscript sources dating from c. 1530 to c. 1640.


2020 ◽  
Vol 219 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Titlow ◽  
Francesca Robertson ◽  
Aino Järvelin ◽  
David Ish-Horowicz ◽  
Carlas Smith ◽  
...  

Memory and learning involve activity-driven expression of proteins and cytoskeletal reorganization at new synapses, requiring posttranscriptional regulation of localized mRNA a long distance from corresponding nuclei. A key factor expressed early in synapse formation is Msp300/Nesprin-1, which organizes actin filaments around the new synapse. How Msp300 expression is regulated during synaptic plasticity is poorly understood. Here, we show that activity-dependent accumulation of Msp300 in the postsynaptic compartment of the Drosophila larval neuromuscular junction is regulated by the conserved RNA binding protein Syncrip/hnRNP Q. Syncrip (Syp) binds to msp300 transcripts and is essential for plasticity. Single-molecule imaging shows that msp300 is associated with Syp in vivo and forms ribosome-rich granules that contain the translation factor eIF4E. Elevated neural activity alters the dynamics of Syp and the number of msp300:Syp:eIF4E RNP granules at the synapse, suggesting that these particles facilitate translation. These results introduce Syp as an important early acting activity-dependent regulator of a plasticity gene that is strongly associated with human ataxias.


Author(s):  
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

The Chambers of Rhetoric are generally considered as a cultural andsocial phenomenon of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to thedominant view, both in the Northern and Southern Low Countries rhetoricianculture lost its relevance in the seventeenth century. Instead of documentingthat 'decline', this article seeks to define the changing cultural functions andsocial composition of the Chambers of Rhetoric in seventeenth-centuryFlanders and Brabant. It will be argued that the cultural model of the seventeenth-century rhetoricians differed considerably from that of their fifteenth andsixteenth-century predecessors, but that it fitted well into a new politicaland social context.


2001 ◽  
Vol 75 (10) ◽  
pp. 4604-4613 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Suzuki ◽  
Allen Portner ◽  
Ruth Ann Scroggs ◽  
Makoto Uchikawa ◽  
Noriko Koyama ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Through their hemagglutinin-neuraminidase glycoprotein, parainfluenza viruses bind to sialic acid-containing glycoconjugates to initiate infection. Although the virus-receptor interaction is a key factor of infection, the exact nature of the receptors that human parainfluenza viruses recognize has not been determined. We evaluated the abilities of human parainfluenza virus types 1 (hPIV-1) and 3 (hPIV-3) to bind to different types of gangliosides. Both hPIV-1 and hPIV-3 preferentially bound to neolacto-series gangliosides containing a terminal N-acetylneuraminic acid (NeuAc) linked toN-acetyllactosamine (Galβ1-4GlcNAc) by the α2-3 linkage (NeuAcα2-3Galβ1-4GlcNAc). Unlike hPIV-1, hPIV-3 bound to gangliosides with a terminal NeuAc linked to Galβ1-4GlcNAc through an α2-6 linkage (NeuAcα2-6Galβ1-4GlcNAc) or to gangliosides with a different sialic acid, N-glycolylneuraminic acid (NeuGc), linked to Galβ1-4GlcNAc (NeuGcα2-3Galβ1-4GlcNAc). These results indicate that the molecular species of glycoconjugate that hPIV-1 recognizes are more limited than those recognized by hPIV-3. Further analysis using purified gangliosides revealed that the oligosaccharide core structure is also an important element for binding. Gangliosides that contain branchedN-acetyllactosaminoglycans in their core structure showed higher avidity than those without them. Agglutination of human, cow, and guinea pig erythrocytes but not equine erythrocytes by hPIV-1 and hPIV-3 correlated well with the presence or the absence of sialic acid-linked branched N-acetyllactosaminoglycans on the cell surface. Finally, NeuAcα2-3I, which bound to both viruses, inhibited virus infection of Lewis lung carcinoma-monkey kidney cells in a dose-dependent manner. We conclude that hPIV-1 and hPIV-3 preferentially recognize oligosaccharides containing branchedN-acetyllactosaminoglycans with terminal NeuAcα2-3Gal as receptors and that hPIV-3 also recognizes NeuAcα2-6Gal- or NeuGcα2-3Gal-containing receptors. These findings provide important information that can be used to develop inhibitors that prevent human parainfluenza virus infection.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document