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Epidemic Encounters, Communities, and Practices in the Colonial World
The essays in this volume examine the nature and extent of disease on indigenous communities and local populations located within the vast regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a result of colonial sea power and colonial conquest. While this established a long-term impact of disease on populations, the essays also offer insights into the dynamics of these populations in resisting colonial intrusions and introduction of disease to newly-acquired territories.
Visible Empire
Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now. In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a wi...
Global Ocean of Knowledge, 1660-1860
This book looks to fill the 'blue hole' in Global History by studying the role of the oceans themselves in the creation, development, reproduction and adaptation of knowledge across the Atlantic world. It shows how globalisation and the growth of maritime knowledge served to reinforce one another, and demonstrates how and why maritime history should be put firmly at the heart of global history. Exploring the dynamics of globalisation, knowledge-making and European expansion, Global Ocean of Knowledge takes a transnational approach and transgresses the traditional border between the early modern and modern periods. It focuses on three main periodisations, which correspond with major transform...
Histories of Scientific Observation
Observation is the most pervasive and fundamental practice of all the modern sciences, both natural and human. Its instruments include not only the naked senses but also tools such as the telescope and microscope, the questionnaire, the photographic plate, the notebook, the glassed-in beehive, and myriad other ingenious inventions designed to make the invisible visible, the evanescent permanent, the abstract concrete. Yet observation has almost never been considered as an object of historical inquiry in itself. This wide-ranging collection offers the first examination of the history of scientific observation in its own right, as both epistemic category and scientific practice. Histories of S...
Useful Objects
Useful Objects examines the cultural history of nineteenth-century American museums through the eyes of writers, visitors, and collectors. Throughout this period, museums gradually transformed from encyclopedic cabinets to more specialized public institutions. These changes prompted wider debates about how museums determine what objects to select, preserve, and display-and who gets to decide. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials and accounts in fiction, guidebooks, and periodicals, Useful Objects shows how the challenges facing nineteenth-century museums continue to resonate in debates about their role in American culture today.
Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire's Periphery
The Spanish Empire is famous for being, at its height, the realm upon which "the sun never set." It stretched from the Philippines to Europe by way of the Americas. And yet we know relatively little about how Spain managed to move that crucial currency of governance—paper—over such enormous distances. Moreover, we know even less about how those distances were perceived and understood by people living in the empire. This book takes up these unknowns and proposes that by examining how documents operated in the Spanish empire, we can better understand how the empire was built and, most importantly, how knowledge was created. The author argues that even in such a vast realm, knowledge was bu...
Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural
Throughout history, both art and science have been employed to visualise things unseen and to image/imagine things unknown as part of the quest to understand nature. In light of this, perhaps our contemporary tendency to see art and science as completely divergent, mutually exclusive fields of study with similarly distinct methodologies may be profitably re-examined. This volume brings together recent work by both junior and senior scholars treating the art/science connection in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. The essays are individual case studies dealing with historical interconnections between drawing, painting, sculpture and book illustration and such diverse fields of science as...
Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800
This volume is a collection of essays that examines the practices and aims of science in the early modern Spanish and Portuguese empires (ca. 1500-1800), situating them in their historical, cultural, social, and political context.
The Gentleman, the Virtuoso, the Inquirer
The Gentleman, the Virtuoso, the Inquirer: Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa and the Art of Collecting in Early Modern Spain explores the history of the Aragonese Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa (1607-1682) as scientific collector: his cabinet of curiosities, the garden created in the enviroment of his palace, his chemical laboratory, and the books, manuscripts, maps and other curiosities collected in his library. At once a patron, courtier, and 'curioso', Lastanosa was deeply inmersed in the culture of 'virtuosity' and its fascination with the wonders and secrets of nature. Lastanosa was, perhaps, not an innovator, and certainly no Baconian, but, like many others collectors of his day, in his own way he furthered the ideal of factuality that was of cardinal importance in the early stages of the Scientific Revolution.
Colonial Botany
A wide-ranging collection of essays on plants as market forces.
