The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthusis a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus'sEssay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on ...population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus'sEssayis also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, theEssaysystematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence.
Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus'sEssaywas a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas. They explore what the Atlantic and Pacific new worlds-from the Americas and the Caribbean to New Zealand and Tahiti-meant to Malthus, and how he treated them in hisEssay. Bashford and Chaplin reveal how Malthus, long vilified as the scourge of the English poor, drew from his principle of population to conclude that the extermination of native populations by European settlers was unjust.
Elegantly written and forcefully argued,The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthusrelocates Malthus'sEssayfrom the British economic and social context that has dominated its reputation to the colonial and global history that inspired its genesis.
InAn Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the ...influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history.Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world.Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.
Humanist and scientific analyses of the Anthropocene concept may be distinctive as a coinvestigation across disciplinary borders. While scientists only in 2023 hypothesized the Anthropocene's ...inception in the 1950s (as measured by atomic residue), humanists have for several decades been investigating the concept as a probable reality and argue for its longer chronology. The six books reviewed here identify the early modern period, especially the eighteenth century, as a convincing moment of transition, indicating a longer era of relevant anthropogenic activity. This periodization has important implications for addressing the ongoing environmental crisis, which will require both humanist and scientific knowledge.
This is a very useful scholarly volume on an author who is both notorious yet understudied, a situation that begs for more intelligent interventions and challenges to received opinion. The issue of ...human population and the possibilities of over- or under-population continue to divide academics, political figures, and members of the general public. The essays in this book could be helpful, inspiring more and deeper analysis of the long debate over Thomas Robert Malthus’s impact on socio-econom...
The fact that nonhuman animals share the power of communication, plus the likelihood that some share our capacity for ideation, demands reevaluation of why human ideas matter, and especially whether ...they adequately convey a sense of our place within the rest of nature. Nonhuman beings and phenomena may be intrinsically unhuman, but are not necessarily less important than us. Analysis of this difference-as-significance is an ongoing problem of the Anthropocene. This essay focuses on Arthur Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being and Edmund Burke’s concept of the sublime, describing alternative ways of situating humans in relation to the nonhuman.
In the last few years, the AHR has published six "Conversations," each on a subject of interest to a wide range of historians: "On Transnational History" (2006), "Religious Identities and Violence" ...(2007), "Environmental Historians and Environmental Crisis" (2008), "Historians and the Study of Material Culture" (2009), "Historical Perspectives on the Circulation of Information" (2011), and "The Historical Study of Emotions" (2012). For each the process has been the same: the Editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation, which is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the December issue. The goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging consideration of a topic at a high level of expertise, in which the participants are recruited across several fields and periods. It is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to undertake.
This year's topic is "How Size Matters: The Question of Scale in History." Many working historians-perhaps more those of past generations than today-might regard this question as irrelevant if not downright strange. Most traditional history, after all, is spatially defined by categories such as the nation-state, or chronologically constrained by the temporal boundaries of an event or era, or otherwise contextualized in terms of time and space by implicit "givens." At least since the rise of the Annales school of history in the 1970s, however, these assumed categories have been challenged by such concepts as the Braudelian "world" and the longue durée, and subsequently by the vogue of "microhistory." In more recent years there has been the rise of global or world history, as well as, even more recently, "deep" history, which challenges historians to think not only in years or centuries but across the vast spaces of evolutionary and even planetary time. The conversation that follows touches on all of these topics.
Joining the Editor here are Sebouh David Aslanian, a scholar of early modern Armenian and world history at UCLA; Joyce E. Chaplin, a historian of the environment and of science from Harvard University; Kristin Mann, an African historian at Emory University; and Ann McGrath, a scholar of colonialism and Indigenous history at the Australian National University. In addition, all of these scholars have an active interest in global and world history, which largely provided the theme of the conversation.
The fact that nonhuman animals share the power of communication, plus the likelihood that some share our capacity for ideation, demands reevaluation of why human ideas matter, and especially whether ...they adequately convey a sense of our place within the rest of nature. Nonhuman beings and phenomena may be intrinsically unhuman, but are not necessarily less important than us. Analysis of this difference-as-significance is an ongoing problem of the Anthropocene. This essay focuses on Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being and Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime, describing alternative ways of situating humans in relation to the nonhuman.
Climate is the crucial issue of our era because significant changes to it will change everything else in nature, with terrible implications for the quality of human life and for the observance of ...justice among peoples and nations. Climate thus alters what it means to be a historian. “The true historian is like the ogre in the story,” the great French historian Marc Bloch once wrote: “wherever he smells human flesh he recognizes his prey.” “Nicely put,” countered Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “but in spite of my immense admiration for Marc Bloch his definition has always seemed to me too narrow.” Le Roy Ladurie wanted historians to be omnivores. To the human-centered topics of conventional historical inquiry, he added a nonhuman part of nature, climate. The field of climate history is now blossoming. Early Americanists can (and should) make contributions to it that no other scholars could provide. We study what happened when one part of the globe, the Americas, was integrated into the rest after a long physical and cultural isolation. Climate studies prompt us to consider the physical and cultural dimensions of that reintegration together and to show other scholars how this conjoined interrogation of nature and culture can be done.
Earthsickness CHAPLIN, JOYCE E.
Bulletin of the history of medicine,
12/2012, Letnik:
86, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
From their distinctive experience of going around the world, maritime circumnavigators concluded that their characteristic disease, sea scurvy, must result from their being away from land too long, ...much longer than any other sailors. They offered their scorbutic bodies as proof that humans were terrestrial creatures, physically suited to the earthly parts of a terraqueous globe. That arresting claim is at odds with the current literature on the cultural implications of European expansion, which has emphasized early modern colonists' and travelers' fear of alien places, and has concluded that they had a small and restricted geographic imagination that fell short of the planetary consciousness associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But circumnavigators did conceive of themselves as actors on a planetary scale, as creatures adapted to all of the land on Earth, not just their places of origin.
Food in time and place Freedman, Paul; Chaplin, Joyce E; Albala, Ken
2014., 20141017, 2014, 2014-11-24
eBook
Food and cuisine are important subjects for historians across many areas of study. Food, after all, is one of the most basic human needs and a foundational part of social and cultural histories. Such ...topics as famines, food supply, nutrition, and public health are addressed by historians specializing in every era and every nation.Food in Time and Placedelivers an unprecedented review of the state of historical research on food, endorsed by the American Historical Association, providing readers with a geographically, chronologically, and topically broad understanding of food cultures-from ancient Mediterranean and medieval societies to France and its domination of haute cuisine. Teachers, students, and scholars in food history will appreciate coverage of different thematic concerns, such as transfers of crops, conquest, colonization, immigration, and modern forms of globalization.
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