Download or read book Moving Crops and the Scales of History written by Francesca Bray and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-14 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”—the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a crop Human efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another. This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”: the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies, and other elements that form around a crop. The cropscape is a method of reconnecting the global with the local, the longue durée with microhistory, and people, plants, and places with abstract concepts such as tastes, ideas, skills, politics, and economic forces. Through investigating a range of contrasting cropscapes spanning millennia and the globe, the authors break open traditional historical structures of period, geography, and direction to glean insight into previously invisible actors and forces.
Download or read book Microhistories of Technology written by Mikael Hård and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this open access book, Mikael Hård tells a story of how people around the world challenged the production techniques and products brought by globalization. Retaining their autonomy and freedom, creative individuals selectively adopted or rejected modern gadgets, tools, and machines. In standard historical narratives, globalization is portrayed as an unstoppable force that flattens all obstacles in its path. Modern technology is also seen as inexorable: in the nineteenth century, steamships, telegraph lines, and Gatling guns are said to have paved the way for colonialism and other forms of dominating people and societies. Later, shipping containers and computer networks purportedly pulled the planet deeper into a maelstrom of capitalism. Hård discusses instances that push back against these narratives. For example, in Soviet times, inhabitants of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, preferred to remain in—and expand—their own mud-brick houses rather than move into prefabricated, concrete residential buildings. Similarly, nineteenth-century Sumatran carpenters ignored the saws brought to them by missionaries—and chose to chop down trees with their arch-bladed adzes. And people in colonial India successfully competed with capitalist-run Caribbean sugar plantations, continuing to produce their own muscovado and sell it to local consumers. This book invites readers to view the history of technology and material culture through the lens of diversity. Based on research funded by the European Research Council and conducted in the Global South, Microhistories of Technology: Making the World shows that the spread of modern technologies did not erase artisanal production methods and traditional tools.
Download or read book Knowledge Flows in a Global Age written by John Krige and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-09-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation. Focusing on what happens to knowledge at national borders, rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, the contributors to this collection stress the human intervention that shapes and drives how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve differing and uneven interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a vast range of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities--like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, and high-performance computers--to the more conceptual apparatuses of telecommunications, statistics, and food sovereignty. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, and Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and United Kingdom. The variety of the kinds of knowledge addressed in the chapters brings forth an extraordinary array of state and non-state actors and institutions committed to performing the work needed to move knowledge across national borders.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History written by Jeannie Whayne and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 673 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural history has enjoyed a rebirth in recent years, in part because the agricultural enterprise promotes economic and cultural connections in an era that has become ever more globally focused, but also because of agriculture's potential to lead to conflicts over precious resources. The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History reflects this rebirth and examines the wide-reaching implications of agricultural issues, featuring essays that touch on the green revolution, the development of the Atlantic slave plantation, the agricultural impact of the American Civil War, the rise of scientific and corporate agriculture, and modern exploitation of agricultural labor.
Download or read book Invitation to a Banquet The Story of Chinese Food written by Fuchsia Dunlop and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world’s most sophisticated gastronomic culture, brilliantly presented through a banquet of thirty Chinese dishes. Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese laborers began to settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication—but today that is beginning to change. In Invitation to a Banquet, award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy, and techniques of Chinese culinary culture. In each chapter, she examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a distinctive aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients, or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting food producers, chefs, gourmets, and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is cooked, eaten, and considered in its homeland. Weaving together history, mouthwatering descriptions of food, and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.
Download or read book Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World written by Gregory M. Thaler and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-27 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unflinching investigation of the false promises of land sparing, exposing how its illusory successes mask the failures of green capitalism For two decades, the concept of land sparing, the claim that agricultural intensification can spare land by preventing forest clearing for agricultural expansion, has dominated tropical forest conservation. Land sparing policies transform landscapes and livelihoods with the promise of reconciling agricultural development with environmental conservation. But that land sparing promise is false. Based on six years of research on agrarian frontiers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Bolivia, this book traces where and how land sparing becomes policy and charts the social and ecological effects of these political contests. Gregory M. Thaler explains why land sparing appears successful in some places but not in others and reveals that success as an illusion achieved by displacing deforestation to new frontiers. The failure of land sparing exposes a harsh truth behind assurances of green capitalism: capitalist development is ecocide.
Download or read book Nature Culture and Race in Colonial Cuba written by Lee Sessions and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-18 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and necessary examination of how nineteenth-century Cuban white elites viewed the natural world, material culture, and political power as intertwined In the decades before the Cuban wars of independence, white elites exploited the island’s natural history and culture to redefine racial identity and reassert authority. These practices occurred in the face of challenges to their political power from Cubans of mixed race and as Cuba’s dependence on sugar led to ecological and economic precarity. Lee Sessions uses close visual analysis to investigate how white elites wielded power by manipulating material culture, placing in conversation for the first time the natural history museums, botanical gardens, and thousands of paintings, drawings, and prints produced in and about Cuba from 1820 to 1860. This important and novel book explores how groups used material culture to imagine their own future at a moment when racial and political dynamics were changing rapidly, while facing an ecological disaster of unimaginable scale.
Download or read book Trees Are Shape Shifters written by Andrew S. Mathews and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the anthropogenic landscapes of Lucca, Italy, and how its people understand social and environmental change through cultivation In Italy and around the Mediterranean, almost every stone, every tree, and every hillside show traces of human activities. Situating climate change within the context of the Anthropocene, Andrew Mathews investigates how people in Lucca, Italy, make sense of social and environmental change by caring for the morphologies of trees and landscapes. He analyzes how people encounter climate change, not by thinking and talking about climate, but by caring for the environments around them. Maintaining landscape stability by caring for the forms of trees, rivers, and hillsides is a way that people link their experiences to the past and to larger scale political questions. The human-transformed landscapes of Italy are a harbinger of the experiences that all of us are likely to face, and addressing these disasters will call upon all of us to think about the human and natural histories of the landscapes we live in.
Download or read book The Making of the Human Sciences in China written by Howard Chiang and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides a history of how “the human” has been constituted as a subject of scientific inquiry in China from the seventeenth century to the present.
Download or read book Entangled Itineraries written by Pamela H. Smith and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted. Entangled Itineraries traces this movement of knowledge across the Eurasian continent from the early years of the Common Era to the nineteenth century, following local goods, techniques, tools, and writings as they traveled and transformed into new material and intellectual objects and ways of knowing. Focusing on nonlinear trajectories of knowledge in motion, this volume follows itineraries that weaved in and out of busy, crowded cosmopolitan cities in China; in the trade hubs of Kucha and Malacca; and in centers of Arabic scholarship, such as Reyy and Baghdad, which resonated in Bursa, Assam, and even as far as southern France. Contributors explore the many ways in which materials, practices, and knowledge systems were transformed and codified as they converged, swelled, at times disappeared, and often reemerged anew.
Download or read book The Rice Economies written by Francesca Bray and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-05-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wide-ranging both historically and geographically, The Rice Economies brilliantly addresses a subject of abiding interest to anthropologists, economists, and historians as well as those concerned with development issues and Asian studies. It is the first work to formulate a logical, historical dynamic of development in Asia's rice economies up to the present day. The comparison of mechanized Western farming methods with the more labor intensive, less environmentally destructive Asian methods is of value to environmentalists and economists concerned with the need for sustainable development. In a new preface, the author reflects upon the increasing relevance of the concerns of the book to international environmental issues.
Download or read book The History of Agriculture written by Britannica Educational Publishing and published by Britannica Educational Publishing. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agriculturethat is, using and managing natural resourceshas a long and complex history. For thousands of years, societies have relied on plants and animals for food and other items, making agriculture as vital to their survival as it is to ours. The cultivation of various crops and livestock over time and throughout the world are examined, revealing the history behind and importance of much of the food we eat today. Also covered are the techniques and equipment that have been developed over time to facilitate agricultural production.
Download or read book Technology in the Industrial Revolution written by Barbara Hahn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-23 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Places the British Industrial Revolution in global context, providing a fresh perspective on the relationship between technology and society.
Download or read book The Social History of Agriculture written by Christopher Isett and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-11-09 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative text provides a compelling narrative world history through the lens of food and farmers. Tracing the history of agriculture from earliest times to the present, Christopher Isett and Stephen Millerargue that people, rather than markets, have been the primary agents of agricultural change. Exploring the actions taken by individuals and groups over time and analyzing their activities in the wider contexts of markets, states, wars, the environment, population increase, and similar factors, the authors emphasize how larger social and political forces inform decisions and lead to different technological outcomes. Both farmers and elites responded in ways that impeded economic development. Farmers, when able to trade with towns, used the revenue to gain more land and security. Elites used commercial opportunities to accumulate military power and slaves. The book explores these tendencies through rich case studies of ancient China; precolonial South America; early-modern France, England, and Japan; New World slavery; colonial Taiwan; socialist Cuba; and many other periods and places. Readers will understand how the promises and problems of contemporary agriculture are not simply technologically derived but are the outcomes of decisions and choices people have made and continue to make.
Download or read book The Indiana Weed Book written by Willis Stanley Blatchley and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Collecting Food Cultivating People written by Kathryn Michelle De Luna and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich analysis of the complex dynamic between food collection and food production in the farming societies of precolonial south central Africa Engaging new linguistic evidence and reinterpreting published archaeological evidence, this sweeping study explores the place of bushcraft and agriculture in the precolonial history of south central Africa across nearly three millennia. Contrary to popular conceptions that place farming at the heart of political and social change, political innovation in precolonial African farming societies was actually contingent on developments in hunting, fishing, and foraging, as de Luna reveals.
Download or read book Seeds of Sustainability written by Pamela A. Matson and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2012-09-26 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeds of Sustainability is a groundbreaking analysis of agricultural development and transitions toward more sustainable management in one region. An invaluable resource for researchers, policymakers, and students alike, it examines new approaches to make agricultural landscapes healthier for both the environment and people. The Yaqui Valley is the birthplace of the Green Revolution and one of the most intensive agricultural regions of the world, using irrigation, fertilizers, and other technologies to produce some of the highest yields of wheat anywhere. It also faces resource limitations, threats to human health, and rapidly changing economic conditions. In short, the Yaqui Valley represents the challenge of modern agriculture: how to maintain livelihoods and increase food production while protecting the environment. Renowned scientist Pamela Matson and colleagues from leading institutions in the U.S. and Mexico spent fifteen years in the Yaqui Valley in Sonora, Mexico addressing this challenge. Seeds of Sustainability represents the culmination of their research, providing unparalleled information about the causes and consequences of current agricultural methods. Even more importantly, it shows how knowledge can translate into better practices, not just in the Yaqui Valley, but throughout the world.
