Studies in Comparative Early Modern History – serie

The essays presented in this volume, first published in 2000, describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilisation of manpower and resources needed to build them favoured some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Previous collective volumes on the subject have dealt mainly with Europe, but the historians and art historians who collaborate here follow a comparative agenda. The millennial practice of wall building that branched out from the ancient Near East into India, Europe, and North Africa shows continuities and points of contact of which the makers of urban fortifications were scarcely aware; separate traditions in China, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.

How did state power impinge on the religion of the ordinary person? This perennial issue has been sharpened as historians uncover the process of 'confessionalization' or 'acculturation', by which officials of state and Church collaborated in ambitious programs of Protestant or Catholic reform, intended to change the religious consciousness and the behaviour of ordinary men and women. In the belief that specialists in one area of the globe can learn from the questions posed by colleagues working in the same period in other regions, this 2005 volume sets the topic in a wider framework. Thirteen essays, grouped in themes affording parallel views of England and Europe, Tsarist Russia, and Ming China, show a spectrum of possibilities for what early modern governments tried to achieve by regulating religious life, and for how religious communities evolved in new directions, either in keeping with or in spite of official injunctions.

The Political Economy of Merchant Empires focuses on why European concerns eventually achieved dominance in global trade in the period between 1450 and 1750, at the expense, especially in Asia, of well-organised and well-financed rivals. The volume is a companion to The Rise of Merchant Empires, also edited by James Tracy, which dealt with changes in the growth and composition of long-distance trade during the same period.

European dominance of the shipping lanes in the early modern period was a prelude to the great age of European imperial power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet in the present age we can see that the pre-imperial age was in fact more an 'age of partnership' or an 'age of competition' when the West and Asia vied on even terms. The essays in this volume examine, on a global basis, the many different trading empires from the end of the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.

This volume brings together the work of twenty historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars who have tried to examine the nature of the encounter between Europeans and the other peoples of the world from roughly 1450 to 1800, the early modern era. The book is world-wide in scope - ranging from Hawaii, Australia, and China to the Americas and Africa - but is unified by the central underlying theme that implicit understandings influence every culture's ideas about itself and others. These understandings, however, are changed by experience in a constantly shifting process in which both sides participate. This makes such encounters complex historical events and moments of 'discovery'. The scholars gathered here grapple with the questions of how we observe, and how observation and representation can reveal as much about ourselves as about those we observe.

The Political Economy of Merchant Empires focuses on why European concerns eventually achieved dominance in global trade in the period between 1450 and 1750, at the expense, especially in Asia, of well-organised and well-financed rivals. The volume is a companion to The Rise of Merchant Empires, also edited by James Tracy, which dealt with changes in the growth and composition of long-distance trade during the same period.

The essays presented in this volume, first published in 2000, describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilisation of manpower and resources needed to build them favoured some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Previous collective volumes on the subject have dealt mainly with Europe, but the historians and art historians who collaborate here follow a comparative agenda. The millennial practice of wall building that branched out from the ancient Near East into India, Europe, and North Africa shows continuities and points of contact of which the makers of urban fortifications were scarcely aware; separate traditions in China, sub-Saharan Africa, and North America illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.