HIST 229: Spectacles of Power in Europe, 1550-1700 (HC)

Agents without Empire explores race making in this period of European history in the context of diplomatic reposts, travel accounts, natural history, propaganda, religious literature, poetry, theater, fiction, and cheap print. It intervenes in conversations in race theory, theories of agency and the history of diplomacy and spying to offer a new account of race making in early modern Europe.

A broad-based and accessible anthology of travel and colonial writing in the English Renaissance, selected to represent the world-picture of 16th- and 17th-century readers in England. It includes not just narratives of discovery but also accounts of cultures already well known through trade links, like Turkey, and places that featured mainly in stories including the Far East and Africa.

The Architecture of Empire considers the large-scale public architecture associated with French imperialism in 17th and 18th-century India, Siam, and Vietnam, and 19th and 20th-century Indochina, the largest French colony in Asia. Bailey places particular emphasis on the human factor: the people who commissioned, built, and lived in these buildings. Print copy also available.

In a lively account that spans continents, Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in France and its colonies. She draws on cases from the police and judicial archives of 17th- and 18th-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside literature inspired by those proceedings. Charges of libertinage involved gambling, selling alcohol to Native Americans, secret marriages and other anti-authoritarian activities.

A major corrective to the long-held view of Orientalism that accords agency only to Europeans, Beyond Orientalism emphasizes the active role played by Hajarî and other "Orientals" inside and outside of Europe in some of the most significant intellectual movements of the age. Zhiri explores the multiple interactions between these two networks of intellectuals, decentering Europe to reveal how Hajarî worked collaboratively to circulate knowledge among Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Through the lens of historic artworks, artefacts and natural history specimens, this book and the exhibition it accompanies analyse the rise and growth of enslavement, the profits made by Dutch and British traders and plantation-owners, the power of images, the knowledge produced by enslaved people, histories of resistance movements and the consequences of these events today.

Richly illustrated study of the impact of Chinese and Japanese material culture on British and Irish historic houses and gardens. This involved not only the importation of Chinese and Japanese luxury goods, but also domestic designers and artisans who created their own fanciful interpretations of 'oriental' art. Drawing on new research, Emile de Bruijn demonstrates how elements of Chinese and Japanese culture were simultaneously desired and misunderstood, dismembered and treasured, idealised and caricatured.

The Cambridge Global History of Fashion provides timely critical analyses of key topics and themes in the history of fashion, dress, and clothing. Featuring over forty essays from experts across the field, the volumes unveil new perspectives on cultural, social, and economic change, and how these changes were expressed through fashion practice. The first volume presents a tight but comprehensive assessment of fashion from antiquity, through the early modern global era to c. 1800. The second volume advances the critique of 'modernity' from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century.

An innovative collection that interrogates the global paradigm of our period and offers a new history of globalization by exploring its influences on English culture and literature of the early modern period. Moves beyond traditional notions of Renaissance history mainly as a revival of antiquity and presents a new perspective on England′s mercantile and cross-cultural interactions with the New and Old Worlds of the Americas, Africa, and the East, as well with Northern Europe. Illustrates how twentieth-century globalization was the result of a lengthy and complex historical process linked to the emergence of capitalism and colonialism. Explores vital topics such as East-West relations and Islam; visual representations of cultural ′others′; gender and race struggles within the new economies and cultures; global drama on the cosmopolitan English stage, and many more.

This book explores the intersections and transformations of empire in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Overview chapters by scholarly researchers analyze war, trade, the natural world, labor, mobility, sexuality, resistance and race.

Uniting twelve original studies by scholars of early modern history, literature, and the arts, this collection takes an interdisciplinary perspective. The volume's central claim is that early modern orientalist discourses are fundamentally open, self-critical, and creative. Analyzing a varied corpus-from German and Dutch travelogues to Spanish humanist treaties, French essays, Flemish paintings, and English diaries-this collection provides productive new perspectives for the study of globalized exchanges in the early modern world.

Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects - ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made - came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Divided into six parts this book explores; the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, empires of things, consuming things and lastly the power of things.

A look at how Elizabethan England was transformed by its interactions with cultures from around the world Dimmock reconstructs a party in 1602 for Elizabeth I with a stunning display of Chinese porcelain. This party was also the likely inspiration for Elizabeth's celebrated Rainbow Portrait, a carefully orchestrated vision of England's emerging ambitions for its engagements with the rest of the world.

Through its aesthetic and social study of the image, and by examining the inner and outer borders of Europe and the mission lands, Eloquent Images contributes significantly to the history of evangelisation, one of the major dynamics of the first European globalisation.

This book examines the wide diversity of images that Europeans produced to represent the wide variety of peoples around the globe. Unique to this book, each chapter concludes with an 'in response,' analysing representations of Europeans by indigenous peoples of each continent to give a deeper and more multi-faceted account.

This book uses the concept of virality to study artworks' role in the uneven processes of early modern globalization. Drawing from archival research in Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Porras traces the trajectories of two interrelated objects made in Antwerp in the late 16th century: an illustrated devotional text and an image by Maerten de Vos of, St. Michael the Archangel. Both were reproduced and adapted across the early modern world

This collection brings together provocative essays examining various facets of Elizabethan foreign affairs, encompassing England and The British Isles, continental Europe, and the Islamic world. As an entirely domestic queen who never physically left her realm, Elizabeth I cast an inordinately large shadow internationally. The essays in this volume collectively reveal a ruler and her kingdom more connected and integrated into the wider world than is usually acknowledged in conventional studies of Elizabethan foreign affairs.

This book brings the history of enslavement in England to light, revealing powerful stories of resistance by enslaved workers from Africa, South Asia, and First-Nations America forced to work in London as sailors and dockworkers, wet-nurses and washerwomen. Freedom Seekers demonstrates that not only were enslaved people present in Restoration London but that white Londoners were intimately involved in the construction of the system of racial slavery. Also available in print.

Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire. By placing these goods in their specific material context--from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan--we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning and of their role in linking the global and the local.

This book demonstrates how greater engagement with the world beyond Europe shaped signature aspects of the English experience. Early modern trading corporations are central participants in the story in concert with foreign actors bringing Ottoman, Bantenese, Huedan, Siamese, and Mughal contributions. They all added to the ideological, institutional, and procedural underpinnings that would develop into the British Empire.

"This collection investigates the relations between literature and the economy in the context of the unprecedented expansion of early modern England's long distance trade. Studying a range of genres and writers, both familiar and lesser known, the essays offer a new history of globalization as a complex of unevenly developing cultural, discursive, and economic phenomena. While focusing on how long distance trade contributed to England's economic growth and cultural transformation, the collection taps into scholarly interest in race, gender, travel and exploration, domesticity, mapping, the state and emergent nationalism, and proto-colonialism in the early modern period."--BOOK JACKET.

With Impressions from China, Romano delivers a study of how European science confronted Chinese knowledge at a time when a "new world order" was needed. The author follows encounters between these two worlds, decrypting learned writings attentively.

As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism. Inventing Exoticism interrogates traditional postcolonial theories of knowledge and power. It proposes a wholly revisionist understanding of geography in a pivotal age of expansion and offers a crucial historical perspective on our own global culture as it engages in a media-saturated world.

Islam in Europe surveys artistic production in the medieval Islamic world and examines the many ways it altered the trajectory of European visual culture. It reveals this interconnectedness through works of art that reflect the contact, influence, and exchange that developed during the medieval period and Renaissance.

Lepanto, celebrated as the greatest triumph of Christendom over the Ottomans, was soon transformed into a powerful myth through a vast media campaign. This book focuses on the storytelling and art that shaped the perception of the battle in Europe including the figure of the Muslim captive.

How did the creation of an overseas empire change politics in England itself? After 1660, English governments aimed to convert scattered overseas dominions into a coordinated territorial power base. Stuart monarchs encouraged schemes for expansion in America, Africa, and Asia, tightened control over existing territories, and endorsed systems of slave labor to boost colonial prosperity.

This collection examines the interdisciplinary phenomenon of making worlds, with essays from scholars of history, literary studies, theatre and performance, art history, and anthropology. Case studies show how peoples around the world resisted the imposition of European economic, religious, political, and military models by generating new cultural syntheses.

Merchants and Explorers follows Barlow, a merchant, and Cabot, a navigator, across the Atlantic to South America and back to Spain and Reformation England. Although it is generally accepted that the English were not significantly attracted to the Americas until the second half of the sixteenth century, Dalton demonstrates that Barlow, Cabot, and their cohorts had a knowledge of the world and its opportunities that was extraordinary for this period. She reveals how shared knowledge as well as the accumulation of capital in international trading networks prior to 1560 influenced emerging ideas of trade, "discovery", settlement, and race in Britain.

Centering her study on a vast corpus of early modern textual and visual sources, Russo contends that the subtlety and inventiveness of the myriad of American, Asian, and African creations actually revolutionized European views. In this way, artifacts from outside Europe between 1400 and 1600 played a definitive role in European transformations: the redefinition of the frontier between the "mechanical" and the "liberal" arts and a new conception of the figure of the artist.

Ordering Customs explores how Renaissance Venetians sought to make sense of human difference in a period characterized by increasing global contact and a rapid acceleration of the circulation of information. The book traces the emergence of a distinctive tradition of ethnographic writing that served as the basis for defining religious and cultural difference in new ways.

The Persian Mirror explores France's preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined. Also available in print.

In the late 16th century, hundreds of travelers made their way to the Habsburg ambassador's residence, known as the German House, in Constantinople. They left an incredible collection of albums filled with images, messages, and more. Radway not only introduces these albums and the people who filled their pages, but she also explains chronologies of exchange, workshop practices, social networks, visual collections based on status, and the purposes of these individualized portraits.

The significance of the communications revolution involving printmaking was profound. Less a part of the standard narrative is recognition of the frequency with which the widespread dissemination of printed works also occurred beyond the borders of Europe. Within a decade of the invention of the Gutenberg press, European prints began to move globally. Numerous prints traveled to areas as varied as Turkey, India, Iran, Ethiopia, China, Japan and the Americas, where they were taken by missionaries, artists, merchants and diplomats.

"This book brings together a range of essays from leading scholars and writers, providing a fascinating and original approach to the Renaissance which challenges settled certainties, such as the difference between East and West, the invariable conflict between Islam and Christianity, the 'rebirth' of European civilization from roots in classical Greece and Imperial Rome, and points the way for a comprehensive re-orientation of our thinking about the Renaissance."--BOOK JACKET.

This companion examines the global Renaissance through object-based case studies of artistic production from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe in the early modern period. Main themes include workshops, the migrations of artists, objects, technologies, diplomatic gifts, imperial ideologies, ethnicity and indigeneity, sacred spaces and image cults.

How did early moderns experience sense and space? How did the expanding cultural, political, and social horizons of the period emerge out of those experiences? This book focuses on four cities as key examples: Florence, Amsterdam, Boston, and Manila. They relate to distinct parts of European cultural and colonialist experience from north to south, republican to monarchical, Catholic to Protestant.

Sino-French Trade at Canton, 1698-1842 presents a rare and lively view of the French experience at Canton, and calls for a reappraisal of France's role in that trade. France was one of the two most important Western powers in the eighteenth century, and was home to one of the three major European East India companies. Yet the nation is woefully underrepresented in Canton trade scholarship.

This is an edition of Some Years Travels into Africa and Asia the Great, especially describing the famous Empires of Persia and Hindustan, as also divers other Kingdoms in the oriental Indies, 1627-30. Herbert (1608-1682) at the age of 21 travelled to India and Persia as a member of Sir Dodmore Cotton’s diplomatic mission to Shah Abbas I, and his book, which proved very popular, ran into several editions over a forty-year period. Herbert made many additions to the original text of his travels so that the enthusiastic young traveller can still be discerned, along with the opinions of a gentleman-scholar and antiquarian .

The personal rule of Louis XIV, following on from a long period of royal minority and apprenticeship, lasted 54 years from 1661 to 1715. But the second half of this personal rule has, until recently, received significantly less scholarly attention. This has obscured important developments. The essays in this volume take a close look at the way a new set of political, social, cultural and economic understandings developed during the final decades of Louis XIV's reign, even though the basic ideological and social underpinnings remained very largely the same. The contributions examine issues including the practices of government, social pressures, overseas expansion, religious dissent, music, literature and the fine arts.

This book examines the Dutch so-called "Golden Age" though its artistic and architectural legacy, recapturing the global dimensions of this period by looking beyond familiar artworks to consider exotic collectibles and trade goods, and the ways in which far-flung colonial cities were made to look and feel like home.

Travel Knowledge examines European travel writing from 1500-1800, with an emphasis on travel to the East Indies, Africa, and the Levant. The importance of travel literature has grown in the humanities as scholars plumb such texts for their insights on colonialism, the other, and the nation, but this is one of the first volumes on European travel in the early modern period. This collection includes both critical essays and the primary texts to which they refer, a unique pairing.

During the early modern period, hundreds of Turks and Moors traded in English and Welsh ports, dazzled English society with exotic cuisine and Arabian horses, and worked small jobs in London, while the "Barbary Corsairs" raided coastal towns and, if captured, lingered in Plymouth jails or stood trial in Southampton courtrooms. In turn, Britons fought in Muslim armies, traded and settled in Moroccan or Tunisian harbor towns, joined the international community of pirates in Mediterranean and Atlantic outposts, served in Algerian households and ships, and endured captivity from Salee to Alexandria and from Fez to Mocha. In Turks, Moors, and Englishmen, Nabil Matar vividly presents new data about Anglo-Islamic social and historical interactions. Matar's detailed research provides a new direction in the study of England's geographic imagination. It also illuminates the subtleties and interchangeability of stereotype, racism, and demonization that must be taken into account in any responsible depiction of English history.

Challenging the prevailing images of India derived from nineteenth-century "orientalism," Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal identifies and explores the traces that exposure to India left on the cultural artifacts and mindset of France's "Great Century."

This book develops a new methodological framework in which to study the connections between early modern travel writing and the self. Turning the scholarly focus from eye-witnessing and proto-ethnography of foreign lands to the 'fashioned' and portrayed selves and 'inner worlds' of travellers - personal memory, autobiographical practices, and lived yet often heavily mediated travel experiences - it opens up perspectives to travel writing in its many modes.

Richard Eden's book Decades includes the first two Tudor voyage accounts to have been printed. Both concern English commercial ventures to the West African coast. This book examines issues of material culture, travel writing, new knowledge, race, and the negotiation of political and religious change.

In Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art, Caroline Fowler examines the fundamental role of the transatlantic slave trade in the production and evolution of seventeenth-century Dutch art. Reading seventeenth-century legal theory, natural history, inventories, and political pamphlets alongside contemporary poetry, theory, and philosophy from Black feminism and the African diaspora, Fowler demonstrates that ideas about property, personhood, and citizenship were central to the oeuvres of artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn, Hercules Segers, Frans Post, Johannes Vermeer, and Maria Sibylla Merian and therefore inescapably within slavery's grasp.