Author: Sheldon Pollock Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822349043 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 389
Book Description
Fills a gap in scholarship on Indian culture and power between 1500 and 1800, arguing that we can't know how colonialism changed South Asia unless we know what there was to be changed.
Author: Meena Bhargava Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 100927662X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 270
Book Description
Did modernity arrive in South Asia with British colonialism? Or was South Asia already modern by then? What might have that modernity looked like? The Early Modern in South Asia engages with these questions. It brings together ten chapters, which collectively trace the contours of South Asia's early modernity between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. They do this by examining the nature of historical change in various domains, including philosophy, warfare, law, environment, politics, violence, religion, and society. The chapters argue that in all these fields, there were noticeable developments during this period, marking a shift from the medieval to the early modern. The introductory chapter contextualizes this by analysing the politics of periodization in history-writing across the world. It discusses the meanings of the relatively new concept of early modernity and the implications of its use for how we understand historical change and continuity in South Asia.
Author: Paula Findlen Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429867921 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 412
Book Description
Empires of Knowledge charts the emergence of different kinds of scientific networks – local and long-distance, informal and institutional, religious and secular – as one of the important phenomena of the early modern world. It seeks to answer questions about what role these networks played in making knowledge, how information traveled, how it was transformed by travel, and who the brokers of this world were. Bringing together an international group of historians of science and medicine, this book looks at the changing relationship between knowledge and community in the early modern period through case studies connecting Europe, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas. It explores a landscape of understanding (and misunderstanding) nature through examinations of well-known intelligencers such as overseas missions, trading companies, and empires while incorporating more recent scholarship on the many less prominent go-betweens, such as translators and local experts, which made these networks of knowledge vibrant and truly global institutions. Empires of Knowledge is the perfect introduction to the global history of early modern science and medicine.
Author: Kiyokazu Okita Publisher: Oxford Theology and Religion M ISBN: 0198709269 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
Focusing on the idea of genealogical affiliation (sampradaya), Kiyokazu Okita explores the interactions between the royal power and the priestly authority in eighteenth-century north India. He examines how the religious policies of Jaisingh II (1688-1743) of Jaipur influenced the self-representation of Gaudiya Vaisnavism, as articulated by Baladeva Vidyabhusana (ca. 1700-1793). Gaudiya Vaiisnavism centred around God Krsna was inaugurated by Caitanya (1486-1533) and quickly became one of the most influential Hindu devotional movements in early modern South Asia. In the increasingly volatile late Mughal period, Jaisingh II tried to establish the legitimacy of his kingship by resorting to a moral discourse. As part of this discourse, he demanded that religious traditions in his kingdom conform to what he conceived of as Brahmanicaly normative. In this context the Gaudiya school was forced to deal with their lack of clear genealogical affiliation, lack of an independent commentary on the Brahmasutras, and their worship of Goddess Radha and Krsna, who, according to the Gaudiyas, were not married. Based on a study of Baladeva's Brahmasutra commentary, Kiyokazu Okita analyses how the Gaudiyas responded to the king's demand.
Author: David Larsson Heidenblad Publisher: Nordic Academic Press ISBN: 9188909409 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
The history of knowledge is a dynamic field of research with bright prospects. In recent years it has been established as an exciting, forward-looking field internationally with a strong presence in the Nordic countries. Forms of Knowledge is the first publication by the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK). The volume brings together some twenty historians from different scholarly traditions to develop the history of knowledge. The knowledge under scrutiny here is the sort which people have regarded and valued as knowledge in various historical settings. The authors apply different perspectives to this knowledge, maintaining the historicity and situatedness of the production and circulation of knowledge. The book presents the history of knowledge in all its rich diversity. The role of knowledge in public life is the focus of some chapters, while others concentrate on the importance of knowledge for individuals or local communities; some chart the realities of academic or systematic knowledge, while others consider its existential or mundane dimensions. Taken together, they make a significant contribution to the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological advances in the field.
Author: Hamish M. Scott Publisher: Oxford Handbooks ISBN: 019959726X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 769
Book Description
This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of "early modernity" itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume II is devoted to "Cultures and Power", opening with chapters on philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment. Subsequent sections examine 'Europe beyond Europe', with the transformation of contact with other continents during the first global age, and military and political developments, notably the expansion of state power.
Author: Rosalind O'Hanlon Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 131744390X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 427
Book Description
In recent years, scholars from a wide range of disciplines have examined the revival in intellectual and literary cultures that took place during India’s ‘early modern’ centuries. This was both a revival as well as a period of intense disputation and critical engagement. It took in the relationship of contemporaries to their own intellectual inheritances, shifts in the meaning and application of particular disciplines, the development of new literary genres and the emergence of new arenas and networks for the conduct of intellectual and religious debate. Exploring the worlds of Sanskrit and vernacular learning and piety in the subcontinent, these essays examine the role of individual scholar intellectuals in this revival, looking particularly at the interplay between intellectual discipline, sectarian links, family history and the personal religious interests of these men. Each essay offers a fine-grained study of an individual. Some are distinguished scholars, poets and religious leaders with subcontinent-wide reputations, others obscure provincial writers whose interest lies precisely in their relative anonymity. A particular focus of interest will be the way in which these men moved across the very different social milieus of early modern India, finding ways to negotiate relationships at courtly centres, temples, sectarian monasteries, the pandit assemblies of the cosmopolitan city of Banaras and lesser religious centres in the regions. This bookw as published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
Author: Federico Marcon Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022625190X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
From the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century Japan saw the creation, development, and apparent disappearance of the field of natural history, or "honzogaku." Federico Marcon traces the changing views of the natural environment that accompanied its development by surveying the ideas and practices deployed by "honzogaku" practitioners and by vividly reconstructing the social forces that affected them. These include a burgeoning publishing industry, increased circulation of ideas and books, the spread of literacy, processes of institutionalization in schools and academies, systems of patronage, and networks of cultural circles, all of which helped to shape the study of nature. In this pioneering social history of knowledge in Japan, Marcon shows how scholars developed a sophisticated discipline that was analogous to European natural history but formed independently. He also argues that when contacts with Western scholars, traders, and diplomats intensified in the nineteenth century, the previously dominant paradigm of "honzogaku "slowly succumbed to modern Western natural science not by suppression and substitution, as was previously thought, but by creative adaptation and transformation.
Author: Anna Winterbottom Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137380209 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World presents a new interpretation of the development of the English East India Company between 1660 and 1720. The book explores the connections between scholarship, patronage, diplomacy, trade, and colonial settlement in the early modern world. Links of patronage between cosmopolitan writers and collectors and scholars associated with the Royal Society of London and the universities are investigated. Winterbottom shows how innovative works of scholarship – covering natural history, ethnography, theology, linguistics, medicine, and agriculture - were created amid multi-directional struggles for supremacy in Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The role of non-elite actors including slaves in transferring knowledge and skills between settlements is explored in detail.