This series of publications aims to fill the gaps in our history, highlighting in particular the significant roles played by black leaders form all walks of life.
A constellation of thoughts by 25 established and emerging scholars who plot the indices of modernity and locate new coordinates within the shifting landscape of art. These newly commissioned essays are accompanied by close to 200 full-colour image plates.
God's word illumines the darkness of society. Groen van Prinsterer's Unbelief and Revolution is a foundational work addressing the inherent tension between religion and modernity. As a historian and politician, Groen was intimately familiar with the growing divide between secular culture and the church in his time. Rather than embrace this division, these lectures, originally published in 1847, argue for a renewed interaction between the two spheres. Groen's work served as an inspiration for many contemporary theologians, and as a mentor to Abraham Kuyper, he had a profound impact on Kuyper's famous public theology. Harry Van Dyke, the original translator, reintroduces this vital contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religion and society.
Set between Holland and a remote Indonesian island, this intimate magical realism novel offers “an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of a legend” (Time). “Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild The Ten Thousand Things is at once novel of shimmering strangeness—and familiarity. It is the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.
Collection of essays focusing on the roles of intermediaries such as brokers and spies, messengers and translators, missionaries and entrepreneurs, in linking different parts of the ever more densely entangled systems of knowledge production and circulation at a key moment in the development of global scientific, commercial and political systems. The period 1770-1820 was decisive for the reformation of imperial projects in the wake of military catastrophe and politico-economic crisis, both in the Atlantic and the Asian/Pacific spheres -- economic and political worlds dominated by complex trade systems and violent contest. This conjuncture also saw the overhaul of networks and institutions of natural knowledge, whether commercial, voluntary or organs of state. Both the industrial and the second scientific revolutions have been dated to this moment. New and decisive relations were forged between different cultures' knowledge carriers. The authors consider knowledge movements of the epoch that escape simple models of metropolitan centre and remote colonial periphery. They question the immutable character of mediators and agents in knowledge communication.
The Netherlands housed a number of widely-known, envied, and emulated centers of accumulation during the early-modern period. Raw and manufactured goods passed through Dutch port cities, linking the country to global cycles of accumulation and exchange. Its institutions of learning and culture similarly served as internationally famous centers of accumulation that furthered knowledge and cultural production, embodied in the form of books, maps, prints, exhibits, and the like. This collection of essays brings together the Dutch histories of manufacture, commerce, and global exchange along with the histories of knowledge and cultural circulation during the 17th and 18th centuries by anatomizing the multi-faceted concept of accumulation. The book explores the processes that led to the formation of concentrated, often hybrid, sites of material, intellectual, and cultural accumulation in the Netherlands and its overseas stations, as well as the concerns and consequences to which the successes and challenges of accumulation gave rise. It will be of interest to historians of science, technology, culture, and economics. (Series: Low Countries Studies on the Circulation of Natural Knowledge - Vol. 2)
This classic text on Arabic grammar and usage is a must-read for anyone studying the Arabic language. Written by two of the most renowned scholars of the language, Albert Schultens and Thomas Erpenius, this book offers a comprehensive and detailed guide to the language, its grammar and its usage. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
The story of colonial collecting is complex and full of contradictions. Collectors often appreciated the 'other' cultures where they obtained collections, but at the same time they had a close relationship with the colonial authorities who were willing to subjugate societies with military violence. This book addresses colonial collecting with examples from the Dutch East Indies and, by means of comparison, with a discussion about collecting in British India. Since the 1990s the phenomenon of collecting has become an important part of anthropological discourse. This development touches upon the foundations of the discipline, since it throws light on how the white colonizers dealt with local cultures, and thus on how the formation of the anthropological discourse took place. The study of collecting can help us to develop an anthropology of intentionality, instrumentality and desire, as Anthony Shelton argues in one of the contributions to this book. Objects do not stop 'to live' when collected. Margaret Wiener discusses the magic of the kris, which is influential even in Europe, far from the context in which the magic is created. Other chapters treat in detail the military entanglement with collecting in the Dutch East Indies. There is also attention for ethnographic collecting in the context of scholarly activities, particularly in the chapter by Ruth Barnes. The broad picture of colonial collecting ,as presented in this book, includes an analysis of the appropriation of the Indonesian Hindu-Buddhist culture by means of collecting Javanese antiquities, detailed descriptions of colonial wars (North Sumatra, South Sulawesi, Bali and Lombok) and a discussion of the cultural heritage of the Ethische Politiek. With contributions by Ruth Barnes, Francine Brinkgreve, Hari Budiarti, Brian Durrans, Wahyu Ernawati, Pieter ter Keurs, Susan Legêne, Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer, Anthony Shelton, Harm Stevens, David Stuart-Fox and Margaret Wiener.
As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. The shapes and meanings of the extraordinary global images that emerged from this process form the subject of this highly original and richly textured study of cultural geography. 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. Illustrated with more than two hundred images of engravings, paintings, ceramics, and more, Inventing Exoticism shows, in vivid example and persuasive detail, how Europeans came to see and understand the world at an especially critical juncture of imperial imagination. At the turn to the eighteenth century, European markets were flooded by books and artifacts that described or otherwise evoked non-European realms: histories and ethnographies of overseas kingdoms, travel narratives and decorative maps, lavishly produced tomes illustrating foreign flora and fauna, and numerous decorative objects in the styles of distant cultures. Inventing Exoticism meticulously analyzes these, while further identifying the particular role of the Dutch—"Carryers of the World," as Defoe famously called them—in the business of exotica. The form of early modern exoticism that sold so well, as this book shows, originated not with expansion-minded imperialists of London and Paris, but in the canny ateliers of Holland. By scrutinizing these materials from the perspectives of both producers and consumers—and paying close attention to processes of cultural mediation—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.