Entanglements, Interactions, and Economies in the Early Modern World – serie

Centered on moral critiques of wealth and the unequal distribution of risks and rewards in the lengthy voyages required by the East Indies trade, this book examines the debates surrounding England’s earliest global trading ventures. Arguments over the staggering loss of lives and national resources and struggles over control of the new trade in luxuries reveal the forging of rationales justifying the new capitalist inequalities. Yet Company servants traveling abroad to conduct the risky trade resisted this newly coalescing social formation through strategic disobedience to their masters’ will, controlling information and promoting ignorance when it served their financial and sexual purposes. Conflicting Claims to East India Company Wealth, 1600–1650 interrogates the forces that shaped England’s earliest forays into capitalist imperialism by tracing the battles over corporate control of men’s finances, marriages, and bare survival at the dawn of its global trade

In the early modern period, members of the Society of Jesus working as missionaries in the so-called mission of Maynas explored vast areas of the upper Amazon. These missionaries belonged to the very small group of Europeans who lived in the forests of the Amazon Basin for longer periods, in close contact with local people. Their daily experiences in the mission, their high level of education, and their connection with the institutional structures of the Jesuit order made them key figures in the production of knowledge about the Amazon. Irina Saladin investigates the complex relationships between mission and knowledge in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit maps. She analyzes how Jesuit missionary practices shaped the cartographic representation of the Amazon in the early modern era.

Max Weber’s classical notion of enchantment serves in this book to highlight the clash and rewiring of ethical and cosmological codes in European and Indian early modern cultural encounters from the 16th century onward. Since Portuguese imperialism was unable to justify itself without invoking otherworldly intervention, Catholic missionaries provided the vocabulary and narrative of global salvation. Each chapter in this volume explores a range of enchantment techniques used by missionaries, encompassing historical prose, poetry, images, and translations, woven through with emotions and wrapped in illocutionary force. Catholic missionaries in India wrote from and about the soft belly of tropical colonialism with certainty about the triumph of Christianity. Understanding the subterranean bond between history and fiction is at the heart of this book.

In 1611, the seventeen-year-old Gustav Adolf ascended the throne of Sweden. Before the new king could sit on his throne, however, he faced a disastrous war against Denmark, another conflict in Russia, and a rebellious nobility at home. Plus, Sweden itself had an arctic climate and a short growing season. Clearly Gustav II Adolf faced great difficulties even to survive. Yet by the end of the next decade, Gustav II Adolf’s Sweden was a leading military power in continental Europe. In 1630 the king invaded the Holy Roman Empire and joined the Thirty Years War to defend the Protestant cause. How was this possible? Sweden had one major asset, the Stora Kopparberg, the largest copper mine in Europe. The king exploited the mine and used the revenue to finance his political and military ambitions. This is the story of Gustav II Adolf’s efforts to improve efficiencies at the mine and control the marketing of its bounty.

This is the story of Gustav II Adolf’s efforts to improve efficiencies at the Stora Kopparberg, the largest copper mine in Europe and control the marketing of its bounty.

Max Weber’s classical notion of enchantment serves in this book to highlight the clash and rewiring of ethical and cosmological codes in European and Indian early modern cultural encounters from the 16th century onward.

In the early modern period, members of the Society of Jesus working as missionaries in the so-called mission of Maynas explored vast areas of the upper Amazon. These missionaries belonged to the very small group of Europeans who lived in the forests of the Amazon Basin for longer periods, in close contact with local people. Their daily experiences in the mission, their high level of education, and their connection with the institutional structures of the Jesuit order made them key figures in the production of knowledge about the Amazon. Irina Saladin investigates the complex relationships between mission and knowledge in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit maps. She analyzes how Jesuit missionary practices shaped the cartographic representation of the Amazon in the early modern era.