When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become ...the enslaved property of the mother's master. InLaboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe,Laboring Womentraverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery. Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives-from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations-she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life. Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery,Laboring Womenis a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.
With the opening of sea routes in the fifteenth century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean Sea. They were refugees and ...migrants, traders and mariners, Jews, Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early seventeenth century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish empire. A Nation Upon The Ocean Sea traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its fragmentation in the middle of the seventeenth and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, their private reflections and public arguments. This finely-textured account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics as merchants of the Portuguese Nation took up the pen to advocate a program of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade. A microhistory, A Nation Upon The Ocean Sea contributes to our understanding of the broader histories of capitalism, empire, and diaspora in the early Atlantic. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/history/9780195175691/toc.html
“Larvatus prodeo,” announced René Descartes at the beginning of the seventeenth century: “I come forward, masked.” Deliberately disguising or silencing their most intimate thoughts and emotions, many ...early modern Europeans besides Descartes-princes, courtiers, aristocrats and commoners alike-chose to practice the shadowy art of dissimulation. For men and women who could not risk revealing their inner lives to those around them, this art of incommunicativity was crucial, both personally and politically. Many writers and intellectuals sought to explain, expose, justify, or condemn the emergence of this new culture of secrecy, and from Naples to the Netherlands controversy swirled for two centuries around the powers and limits of dissimulation, whether in affairs of state or affairs of the heart. This beautifully written work crisscrosses Europe, with a special focus on Italy, to explore attitudes toward the art of dissimulation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Discussing many canonical and lesser-known works, Jon R. Snyder examines the treatment of dissimulation in early modern treatises and writings on the court, civility, moral philosophy, political theory, and in the visual arts.
Entre Aix-en-Provence et Genève, de Paris à Utrecht, cet ouvrage renouvelle les approches traditionnelles de l'histoire religieuse en l'ouvrant davantage à l'histoire sociale dans le contexte urbain. ...Il propose une histoire sociale du religieux. Les fidèles ne sont pas pensés comme des individus dans leur rapport solitaire à Dieu et au clergé mais comme des êtres appartenant à une pluralité de corps. Leur identité religieuse est une de leurs identités corporatives qui sont plurielles (familiales, professionnelles, civiques…). S'appuyant sur la notion d'incorporation, ce livre conçoit la religion comme une dimension de l'expérience des hommes et des femmes qui appartiennent à plusieurs communautés. Comment « faire corps », en quelles occasions et sous quelles formes ? Comment concilier l'appartenance à des corps a priori incompatibles, comment admettre dans un corps la différence confessionnelle ? Comment, aussi, se « désincorporer » en quittant un corps au profit d'un autre, ou par le biais d'une individualisation des conduites ? En mettant en parallèle les mondes protestant et catholique, ce livre interroge donc la religion vécue des citadins de l'Europe de l'Ouest.
Comment cartographiait-on les parcellaires ruraux avant la généralisation des cadastres géométriques d’État ? Si certaines représentations datant du XVe au XVIIIe siècle relèvent indéniablement d’une ...approche scientifique, la plus grande part se rattache à une époque où les cartes n’ont pas le degré d’abstraction qui triomphera ensuite. Utilisant le langage des artistes peintres, elles servent à montrer et à expliquer. Et elles n’en sont que plus significatives. Trois questions sous-tendent l’analyse de nombreux corpus spécifiques au sein de l’Europe moderne : celle de la genèse de ces cartes (contexte de leur création, commanditaires, réalisateurs, utilisateurs) ; celle de leur transmission et de leur classement par les archivistes ; celle enfin de leurs exploitations par les chercheurs, avec ce que permettent aujourd’hui les méthodes des disciplines historiques, géographiques et archéologiques. Plus d’une centaine de cartes en couleur ont été reproduites à l’appui de cette étude.
Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not provides a striking new answer to the classic question of why Europe industrialised from the late eighteenth century and Asia did not. Drawing significantly from ...the case of India, Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than different, both characterized by sophisticated and growing economies. Their subsequent divergence can be attributed to different competitive and ecological pressures that in turn produced varied state policies and economic outcomes. This account breaks with conventional views, which hold that divergence occurred because Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science or institutions. It offers instead a groundbreaking rereading of global economic development that ranges from India, Japan and China to Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire and from the textile and coal industries to the roles of science, technology and the state.
Why Enlightenment culture sparked the Industrial Revolution During the late eighteenth century, innovations in Europe triggered the Industrial Revolution and the sustained economic progress that ...spread across the globe. While much has been made of the details of the Industrial Revolution, what remains a mystery is why it took place at all. Why did this revolution begin in the West and not elsewhere, and why did it continue, leading to today's unprecedented prosperity? In this groundbreaking book, celebrated economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that a culture of growth specific to early modern Europe and the European Enlightenment laid the foundations for the scientific advances and pioneering inventions that would instigate explosive technological and economic development. Bringing together economics, the history of science and technology, and models of cultural evolution, Mokyr demonstrates that culture—the beliefs, values, and preferences in society that are capable of changing behavior—was a deciding factor in societal transformations. Mokyr looks at the period 1500–1700 to show that a politically fragmented Europe fostered a competitive "market for ideas" and a willingness to investigate the secrets of nature. At the same time, a transnational community of brilliant thinkers known as the “Republic of Letters” freely circulated and distributed ideas and writings. This political fragmentation and the supportive intellectual environment explain how the Industrial Revolution happened in Europe but not China, despite similar levels of technology and intellectual activity. In Europe, heterodox and creative thinkers could find sanctuary in other countries and spread their thinking across borders. In contrast, China’s version of the Enlightenment remained controlled by the ruling elite. Combining ideas from economics and cultural evolution, A Culture of Growth provides startling reasons for why the foundations of our modern economy were laid in the mere two centuries between Columbus and Newton. Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and professor of economics and history at Northwestern University and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. His many books include The Enlightened Economy and The Gifts of Athena (Princeton). He is the recipient of the Heineken Prize for History and the International Balzan Prize for Economic History.
Richard A. Goldthwaite, a leading economic historian of the Italian Renaissance, has spent his career studying the Florentine economy. In this magisterial work, Goldthwaite brings together a lifetime ...of research and insight on the subject, clarifying and explaining the complex workings of Florence’s commercial, banking, and artisan sectors.
Florence was one of the most industrialized cities in medieval Europe, thanks to its thriving textile industries. The importation of raw materials and the exportation of finished cloth necessitated the creation of commercial and banking practices that extended far beyond Florence’s boundaries. Part I situates Florence within this wider international context and describes the commercial and banking networks through which the city's merchant-bankers operated. Part II focuses on the urban economy of Florence itself, including various industries, merchants, artisans, and investors. It also evaluates the role of government in the economy, the relationship of the urban economy to the region, and the distribution of wealth throughout the society.
While political, social, and cultural histories of Florence abound, none focuses solely on the economic history of the city. The Economy of Renaissance Florence offers both a systematic description of the city's major economic activities and a comprehensive overview of its economic development from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance to 1600.
