Encountering the Pacific in the Age of the Enlightenment

Encountering the Pacific in the Age of the Enlightenment PDF Author: John Gascoigne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107729017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 580

Book Description
The Pacific Ocean was the setting for the last great chapter in the convergence of humankind from across the globe. Driven by Enlightenment ideals, Europeans sought to extend control to all quarters of the earth through the spread of beliefs, the promotion of trade and the acquisition of new knowledge. This book surveys the consequent encounters between European expansionism and the peoples of the Pacific. John Gascoigne weaves together the stories of British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian voyages to destinations throughout the Pacific region. In a lively and lucid style, he brings to life the idealism, adventures and frustrations of a colourful cast of historical figures. Drawing upon a range of fields, he explores the complexities of the relationships between European and Pacific peoples. Richly illustrated with historical images and maps, this seminal work provides new perspectives on the significance of European contact with the Pacific in the Enlightenment.

Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 1741-1805

Enlightenment and Exploration in the North Pacific, 1741-1805 PDF Author: Cook Inlet Historical Society
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295975832
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Saluting an era of adventure and knowledge seeking, fifteen original essays consider the motivations of European explorers of the Pacific, the science and technology of 18th-century exploration, and the significance of Spanish, French, and British voyages. Among the topics discussed are the quest by enlightenment scientists for new species of plant and animal life, and their fascination with Native cultures; advances in shipbuilding, navigation, medicine, and diet that made extended voyages possible; and the lasting significance of the explorers’ collections, artworks, and journals.

Epidemic Encounters, Communities, and Practices in the Colonial World

Epidemic Encounters, Communities, and Practices in the Colonial World PDF Author: Poonam Bala
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 179365123X
Category : Communicable diseases
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Book Description
Colonial conquest and subsequent introduction of diverse diseases has reshaped the destiny of communities around the globe for centuries. Drawing on untapped archival material on India, Africa and Australia, the essays, offer a counter-narrative of events establishing important links between existing and emerging diseases in our global world.

The Boundless Sea

The Boundless Sea PDF Author: David Abulafia
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199934983
Category : Navigation
Languages : en
Pages : 1115

Book Description
"David Abulafia's new book guides readers along the world's greatest bodies of water to reveal their primary role in human history. The main protagonists are the three major oceans-the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian-which together comprise the majority of the earth's water and cover over half of its surface. Over time, as passage through them gradually extended and expanded, linking first islands and then continents, maritime networks developed, evolving from local exploration to lines of regional communication and commerce and eventually to major arteries. These waterways carried goods, plants, livestock, and of course people-free and enslaved-across vast expanses, transforming and ultimately linking irrevocably the economies and cultures of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas"--

Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World

Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World PDF Author: Eva Maria Mehl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316720861
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
Nearly 4,000 Mexican troops and convicts landed in Manila Bay in the Philippines from 1765 to 1811. The majority were veterans and recruits; the rest were victims of vagrancy campaigns. Eva Maria Mehl follows these forced exiles from recruiting centers, jails and streets in central Mexico to Spanish outposts in the Philippines, and traces relationships of power between the imperial authorities in Madrid and the colonial governments and populations of New Spain and the Philippines in the late Bourbon era. Ultimately, forced migration from Mexico City to Manila illustrates that the histories of the Spanish Philippines and colonial Mexico have embraced and shaped each other, that there existed a connectivity between imperial processes in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, and that a perspective of the Spanish empire centered on the Atlantic cannot adequately reflect the historical importance of the richly textured transpacific world.

Material Encounters

Material Encounters PDF Author: Bronwen Douglas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000993167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
This topical and conceptually innovative book proposes new perspectives on the theme of materiality which, since the 1980s, has animated work across and within disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The particular focus of the chapters in this volume is the materiality of knowledge produced through embodied encounters between people, places, and things in the Pacific Islands, New Guinea, Australia, and Myanmar. The authors consider how materiality mediates the ways in which knowledge is generated or acquired in encounters and becomes expressed through things and material forms of inscription – charts and maps; journals, letters, and reports; drawings; objects; human remains; legends, cartouches, captions, labels, marginalia, and notes; and published works of all kinds. The essays further address processes whereby materialized knowledge is archived, conserved, distributed, restricted, or dispersed – through serendipity, excess, loss, silence, absence, and suppression. This book will be of great interest to upper-level students, researchers, and academics in History, Anthropology and Oceania Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

Exploration

Exploration PDF Author: Stewart Angas Weaver
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199946957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
This clear, succinct, and elegant contribution to the 'Very Short Introductions' series surveys the history of global exploration and assesses the motives, for good and ill, of those who undertook it. Stewart Weaver traces the history of exploration from the first explorers (including Polynesian and Micronesian peoples, the ancient Greeks, Marco Polo, and Ibn BattÐta), to the European discover of America, the Enlightenment and exploration (focusing on James Cook), and the race to the north and south poles

Unfabling the East

Unfabling the East PDF Author: Jürgen Osterhammel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691196478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 692

Book Description
During the long eighteenth century, Europe's travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. In this panoramic and colorful book, Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment's nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East, from the Ottoman Empire and India to China and Japan. Here is the acclaimed book that challenges the notion that Europe's formative engagement with the non-European world was invariably marred by an imperial gaze and presumptions of Western superiority. Osterhammel shows how major figures such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hegel took a keen interest in Asian culture and history, and introduces lesser-known scientific travelers, colonial administrators, Jesuit missionaries, and adventurers who returned home from Asia bearing manuscripts in many exotic languages, huge collections of ethnographic data, and stories that sometimes defied belief. Osterhammel brings the sights and sounds of this tumultuous age vividly to life, from the salons of Paris and the lecture halls of Edinburgh to the deserts of Arabia, the steppes of Siberia, and the sumptuous courts of Asian princes. He demonstrates how Europe discovered its own identity anew by measuring itself against its more senior continent, and how it was only toward the end of this period that cruder forms of Eurocentrism--and condescension toward Asia--prevailed.

Placing the Enlightenment

Placing the Enlightenment PDF Author: Charles W. J. Withers
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226904075
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.

South Seas Encounters

South Seas Encounters PDF Author: Richard Fulton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429885016
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
South Seas Encounters examines several key types of encounters between the many-faceted worlds of Oceania, Britain and the United States in the formative nineteenth century. The eleven essays collected in this volume focus not only on the effect of the two powerful, industrialized colonial powers on the cultures of the Pacific, but the effect of those cultures on the Western cultural perceptions of themselves and the wider world, including understanding encounters and exchanges in ways which do not underemphasize the agency and consequences for all participating parties. The essays also provide insights into the causes, unfolding, and consequences for both sides of a series of significant ethnographic, political, cultural, scientific, educational, and social encounters. This volume makes a significant contribution to increasing scholarly interest in Oceania’s place in British and American nineteenth-century cultural experiences. South Seas Encounters investigates these significant interactions and how they changed the ways that Oceanic, British, and American cultures reflected on themselves and their place in the wider world.