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European overseas trade and diplomacy in some parts of the world went hand in hand with colonization and conquest in others areas. As the introduction to this third volume explains, and the eight expertly written chapters assembled here detail, these were not divergent but intricately connected activities. Through detailed attention to Renaissance literature, travel books, political, scientific and commercial writing, they show how European contact with Asia, the Americas and Africa spurred innovations in warfare, seafaring, and accounting. Demanding the creation of international law, and new labour practices at home and abroad, this contact overhauled previous conceptions of nature, race and sexuality and shaped debates on religion, politics, and power. Renaissance culture, in all its diversity and dynamism, was both the midwife of empire and its progeny.A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Renaissance offers a new understanding of Renaissance culture, commonly understood as a blooming of arts, literature, philosophy, politics, commerce and science that together marked a high point of Western civilization and laid the foundation stone of modernity. It shows that this "rebirth" is organically connected to the processes by which Spain, the Italian states, France, England, and the Netherlands tried to establish their first overseas empires.
Examines the intellectual and artistic foundations of the Imperial Renaissance in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy and traces its political realization in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.
This volume examines the cultural history of ancient Mediterranean empires, and focuses on the Roman Empire; the prototypical empire in western history and imagination. A wide-ranging introduction examines the nexus of state-formation and culture in the ancient Mediterranean world, from the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia to the fall of the Roman Empire in late antiquity. Written by an expert team of scholars this first volume examines war and resistance, different engines of economic performance and social and geographical mobility in the Mediterranean, slavery and social control, lived experience and the imperial discourses of race and identity, and the geographical and ecological settings in which the cultural histories of the Roman world played out. Together these chapters offer a bold new account of the Roman Empire, juxtaposing key topics that are not always considered together under the rubric of “culture.” Richly-illustrated with images of monuments, statues, sculptures, mosaics, paintings, coins, and other colorful artefacts of ancient material culture, this volume reveals how the deep structures of imperial power and authority shaped everything from the labour and movements of the Roman Empire's mostly anonymous subjects to their sexualities and consciousness.
A new history explores how one of Renaissance ItalyÕs leading cities maintained its influence in an era of global exploration, trade, and empire. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was not an imperial power, but it did harbor global ambitions. After abortive attempts at overseas colonization and direct commercial expansion, as Brian Brege shows, Tuscany followed a different path, one that allowed it to participate in EuropeÕs new age of empire without establishing an empire of its own. The first history of its kind, Tuscany in the Age of Empire offers a fresh appraisal of one of the foremost cities of the Italian Renaissance, as it sought knowledge, fortune, and power throughout Asia, the Americas, and beyond. How did Tuscany, which could not compete directly with the growing empires of other European states, establish a global presence? First, Brege shows, Tuscany partnered with larger European powers. The duchy sought to obtain trade rights within their empires and even manage portions of other statesÕ overseas territories. Second, Tuscans invested in cultural, intellectual, and commercial institutions at home, which attracted the knowledge and wealth generated by EuropeÕs imperial expansions. Finally, Tuscans built effective coalitions with other regional powers in the Mediterranean and the Islamic world, which secured the duchyÕs access to global products and empowered the Tuscan monarchy in foreign affairs. These strategies allowed Tuscany to punch well above its weight in a world where power was equated with the sort of imperial possessions it lacked. By finding areas of common interest with stronger neighbors and forming alliances with other marginal polities, a small state was able to protect its own security while carving out a space as a diplomatic and intellectual hub in a globalizing Europe.
A comprehensive, thematic reference work covering the cultural history of Western empires from antiquity through to the 21st century
This volume offers a comprehensive array of readings of 'skin' in Shakespeare's works, a term that embraces the human and animal, noun and verb. Shakespeare / Skin departs from previous studies as it deliberately and often explicitly engages with issues of social and racial justice. Each of the chapters interrogates and centres 'skin' in relation to areas of expertise that include performance studies, aesthetics, animal studies, religious studies, queer theory, Indigenous studies, history, food studies, border studies, postcolonial studies, Black feminism, disease studies and pedagogy. By considering contemporary understandings of skin, this volume examines how the literature of the early modern past creates paths to constructing racial hierarchies. With contributors from the USA, UK, South Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia, chapters are informed by an array of histories, shedding light on how skin was understood in Shakespeare's time and at key moments during the past 400 years in different media and cultures. Chapters include considerations of plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and work by Borderlands Theater, Los Colochos and Satyajit Ray, among many others. For researchers and instructors, this book will help to shape teaching and inform research through its modelling of antiracist critical practice. Collectively, the chapters in this collection allow us to consider how sustained attention to skin via cross-historical and innovative approaches can reveal to us the various uses of Shakespeare that shed light on the fraught nature of our interrelatedness. They set a path for readers to consider how much skin they have in the game when it comes to challenging structures of racism.
Between 1800 and 1920, the territory and influence claimed by Western empires came to cover a larger portion of the globe than at any time before or since. Why and how did this happen? What were the consequences of this unprecedented scramble for dominion? What methods have historians used to understand the increasingly large and structurally complex Western empires that emerged across the long 19th century? In this fifth volume, A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Age of Empire, we trace these questions across a period bookended by two devastating global wars. The forces that enabled unparalleled Western expansion were likewise violent. Often no less traumatically, the phenomenon was also one of cultural exchange and negotiated identities in which both colonized and colonizer were repeatedly made and remade. As cultural historians, we locate the power struggles of empire as much in identity and ways of life as in the movement of armies or the signing of treaties. New technologies of communication, transport and warfare brought an 'Age of Empire' into existence for the West. But it was equally grounded in new ways of thinking about human difference and new beliefs about the state's power to intervene in the most intimate domains of human behavior.
How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about theall-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency? Globalizing Fortune addresses these questions by demonstrating how English economic expansion and global transformation produced a new philosophy of fortune oriented arounddiscerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities. The popular theater played an influential role in dramatizing the new prospects and dangers opened up by nascent global economics and fostering a set of ethical practices for engaging with fortunes unpredictable turns. While largely derided as asinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune made a comeback on the English Renaissance stage as a force associated with valiant risks, ennobling adventures, and purposeful action. The early modern stage also reveals how a new philosophy of fortune led toeconomic exploitation and racialized exclusions.Offering in-depth discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the history of the English commercial theaterlike that of English seaborne expansionwas also a history of fortune. The public theater not only shaped popularunderstandings of fortunes role in a culture undergoing economic transformation, but also addressed this transformation from a unique position because of its own implication in London commerce, its reliance on paying customers, and its vulnerability to the risks and contingencies of liveperformance. Drawing attention to an archive of plays dramatizing maritime travel, trade, and adventure, this book shows how the popular stage shaped evolving understandings of fortune by cultivating new viewing practices and mechanisms of theatrical wonder, as well as modeling proper ways of actingin the face of unknown outcomes and contingency. In short, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the public theater offered the first modern understanding of fortune as a globalizing commercial and ethical phenomenon.
A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. Covering the period from 500 BCE to 500 CE, this is the first book to address the cultural history of shoppers and shopping in antiquity. Evidence for the existence of shops has been found across many archaeological sites in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East but the study of shops and retailing in antiquity is a relatively new subject. From Classical Greece through to the Late Roman Empire, shopping shifted from being a means to an end – a method of supplementing the family diet or providing material goods the household could not manufacture itself – to a form of experience where the processes of browsing and not purchasing became as important as buying. This dramatic transformation is a reflection of the changing material desires of these societies and their perspectives on the ways in which the fulfilment of those desires could be achieved. Recurring themes in this interdisciplinary volume include the lives of 'ordinary' people; the relationship between gender and shopping; the contrast between Greece and Rome; the attitudes towards shopkeepers; the placing of shops in the cityscape; and the zoning of particular crafts and products. A Cultural History of Shopping in Antiquity presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.