A Global History of Knowledge in the Early Modern World
Sources from 1500-1800
Philip Hahn editor Anne Mariss editor Laura Dierksmeier editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:18th Feb '27
£26.99
This title is due to be published on 18th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A collection of newly translated and annotated primary sources that showcase how knowledge was created, transformed and circulated across the early modern world.
Offering a fresh, global approach to the history of knowledge, this book brings together a collection of annotated primary sources, many newly translated and rarely accessible, from across the Early Modern World. Covering the period from roughly 1500 to 1800, this multi-perspective volume reveals how ideas, practices, and beliefs travelled across vast distances—by ship, on foot, in letters, images, and objects—and how they were reshaped in the process.
Organised into three thematic sections, A Global History of Knowledge includes case studies ranging from missionary navigation in colonial Chile to portable sundials in European households, the transfer of Indigenous knowledge from Latin America to the European Republic of Letters, and the flow of Jesuit ideas between Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Each chapter centres on a compelling source—many never before available in English—that opens a window into how knowledge was created, shared, and transformed in a world marked by mobility, encounter, and exchange. This book invites readers to explore how knowledge moved, not just across continents, but between cultures, disciplines and worldviews, and why that movement still matters today.
This is an ideal resource for undergraduate and postgraduate teaching. It provides a highly original collection of sources and a cascade of masterclass-type essays for students to show how such sources can be contextualized and approached in methodologically sophisticated ways. It develops our understanding of the ways in which a rich cast of actors jointly produced new forms of global knowledge and substantially shaped the world across three defining centuries. A must for every reading list that covers global history and the early modern world. * Ulinka Rublack, St John's College, University of Cambridge, UK *
This volume represents cutting-edge scholarship in the history of science, reimagined as the history of knowledge production across conceptual epistemic, linguistic, confessional, and cultural boundaries as well as concrete boundaries of geography and transport. The authors bring together a series of widely varying primary-source case studies drawn from early modern Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas and representing local objects, artifacts, bodily practices, and texts that cut across these boundaries. Each case study is critically analyzed and placed within a global context in a way that systematically shows the kinds of early modern translations taking place between the local and the global. It will be of great value not only to researchers in the field, but in bringing the latest scholarship into the classroom as well. * Paula De Vos, San Diego State University, USA *
This rich collection showcases some of the latest approaches to the history of knowledge and science in transit across the globe, through attention not simply to mobility but also to silence, ignorance and delay among other such blocks to circuitry. The dizzying range of sources considered here, ensures that it will make for a wonderful resource for teaching and for the interrogation of the future pathways of global history. * Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge, UK *
ISBN: 9781350628960
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
320 pages