Science and Civilisation in China: Biology and biological technology. pt. 1. Botany. pt. 2. Agriculture PDF Download

Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521467735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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This fifth volume abridgement of Joseph Needham's monumental work is concerned with the staggering civil engineering feats made in early and medieval China.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 718

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Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521087322
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China series. For nearly fifty years, Needham and his collaborators have revealed the ideals, concepts and achievements of China's scientific and technological traditions from the earliest times to about 1800 through this great enterprise. During his long working lifetime, Needham kept in draft various essays, some written with collaborators, in which he set out his broad views on the Chinese social and historical context. These essays, edited by one of his closest collaborators, Kenneth Robinson, are contained in the present volume. A reading of this material makes it possible to reconstruct the assumptions and problematics that underpinned and drove the Needham project throughout the nearly one half century during which he was at the helm. The documents gathered here reveal the intellectual foundations of one of the greatest scholarly enterprises of the twentieth century.

Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521087315
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 758

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Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521087315
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 756

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The sixth volume of Dr Needham's immense undertaking, like the fourth and fifth, is subdivided into parts for ease of presentation and assimilation, each part bound and published separately. The volume as a whole covers the subjects of biology and biological technology (which includes botany and agriculture, zoology, all aspects of medicine, and pharmaceutics).

Author: Joseph Needham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521419994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 934

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Contains two separate works. The first, by Christian Daniels, is a comprehensive history of Chinese sugar cane technology from ancient times to the early twentieth century. Dr Daniels includes an account of the contribution of Chinese techniques and machinery to the development of world sugar technology in the pre-modern period, devoting special attention to the transfer of this technology to the countries of South-East and East Asia in the period after the sixteenth century. The second, by Nicholas K. Menzies, is a history of forestry in China. A final section compares China's history of deforestation with the cases of Europe and Japan.

Author: R.J. Willis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402040938
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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With a claim to be the first work to document in detail the history of allelopathy, Willis’s text provides an account of the concept of allelopathy as it has occurred through the course of botanical literature from the earliest recorded writings to the modern era. A great deal of information is presented here in a consolidated and accessible form for the first time. The book offers a unique insight into the historical factors which have influenced the popularity of allelopathy.

Author: Roger Hart
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421407124
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Roger Hart debunks the long-held belief that linear algebra developed independently in the West. Accounts of the seventeenth-century Jesuit Mission to China have often celebrated it as the great encounter of two civilizations. The Jesuits portrayed themselves as wise men from the West who used mathematics and science in service of their mission. Chinese literati-official Xu Guangqi (1562–1633), who collaborated with the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to translate Euclid’s Elements into Chinese, reportedly recognized the superiority of Western mathematics and science and converted to Christianity. Most narratives relegate Xu and the Chinese to subsidiary roles as the Jesuits' translators, followers, and converts. Imagined Civilizations tells the story from the Chinese point of view. Using Chinese primary sources, Roger Hart focuses in particular on Xu, who was in a position of considerable power over Ricci. The result is a perspective startlingly different from that found in previous studies. Hart analyzes Chinese mathematical treatises of the period, revealing that Xu and his collaborators could not have believed their declaration of the superiority of Western mathematics. Imagined Civilizations explains how Xu’s West served as a crucial resource. While the Jesuits claimed Xu as a convert, he presented the Jesuits as men from afar who had traveled from the West to China to serve the emperor.

Author: Matilda Baraibar Norberg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000903478
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization. The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most cultivated biotech crop on Earth; used to make a huge variety of food and industrial products, including animal feed, tofu, cooking oil, soy sauce, biodiesel and soap. While there is a burgeoning amount of literature on how the contemporary global soy web affects large tracts of our planet’s social-ecological systems, little attention has been given to the questions of how we got here and what alternative roles the soybean has played in the past. This book fills this gap and demonstrates that it is impossible to properly comprehend the contemporary global soybean chain, or the wider agrofood system of which it is a part, without looking at both their long and short historical development. However, a history of the soybean and its changing roles within equally changing agrofood systems is inexorably a history about globalization. Not only does this book map out where soybeans are produced, but also who governs, wields power and accumulates capital in the entire commodity chain from inputs in production to consumption, as well as identifying the institutional context the global commodity chain operates within. The book concludes with a discussion of the main challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime that could trigger its rupture and end. This book is essential reading for students, practitioners and scholars interested in agriculture and food systems, global commodity chains, globalization, environmental history, economic history and social-ecological systems.