"Eastern Magnificence & European Ingenuity"

Author: Catherine Pagani

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780472112081

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An exploration of the important role played by elaborate clockwork in relations between China and Europe from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries


British Art and the East India Company

British Art and the East India Company

Author: Geoff Quilley

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1783275103

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art, demonstrating how art and related forms of culture were closely tied to commerce and the rise of the commercial state. This book examines the role of the East India Company in the production and development of British art during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when a new "school" of British art was in its formative stages with the foundation of exhibiting societies and the Royal Academy in 1768. It focuses on the Company's patronage, promotion and uses of art, both in Britain and in India and the Far East, and how the Company and its trade with the East were represented visually, through maritime imagery, landscape, genre painting and print-making. It also considers how, for artists such as William Hodges and Arthur William Devis, the East India Company, and its provision of a wealthy market in British India, provided opportunities for career advancement, through alignment with Company commercial principles. In this light, the book's main concern is to address the conflicted and ambiguous nature of art produced in the service of a corporation that was the "scandal of empire" for most of its existence, and how this has shaped and distorted our understanding of the history of British art in relation to the concomitant rise of Britain as a self-consciously commercial and maritime nation, whose prosperity relied upon global expansion, increasing colonialism and the development of mercantile organisations.


Science In China, 1600-1900: Essays By Benjamin A Elman

Science In China, 1600-1900: Essays By Benjamin A Elman

Author: Benjamin A Elman

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2015-05-07

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 9814651125

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Distinguished historian Benjamin A Elman's collective volume on the history of science in imperial China, brings together over 30 years of historical literature on the subject. With updates to the literature and new material including transcripts of podcasts and translated interview articles, Science in China takes the reader on a journey starting in the early 17th century with the missionary efforts of the Jesuits in China, and ending with the Protestant missions in the 19th century. These two milestone encounters brought Western sciences to local Chinese scholars with great success in shaping modern Chinese science. Elman studies the interaction between Western and Chinese sciences through philological research and evidence, and treats the two encounters not as separate events but as a continuum of creative exchange of scientific knowledge and discourse.


The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750

Author: Hamish Scott

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2015-07-23

Total Pages: 769

ISBN-13: 0191020001

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of 'early modernity' itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume II is devoted to 'Cultures and Power', opening with chapters on philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment. Subsequent sections examine 'Europe beyond Europe', with the transformation of contact with other continents during the first global age, and military and political developments, notably the expansion of state power.


Science between Europe and Asia

Science between Europe and Asia

Author: Feza Günergun

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-12-09

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 9048199689

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book explores the various historical and cultural aspects of scientific, medical and technical exchanges that occurred between central Europe and Asia. A number of papers investigate the printing, gunpowder, guncasting, shipbuilding, metallurgical and drilling technologies while others deal with mapping techniques, the adoption of written calculation and mechanical clocks as well as the use of medical techniques such as pulse taking and electrotherapy. While human mobility played a significant role in the exchange of knowledge, translating European books into local languages helped the introduction of new knowledge in mathematical, physical and natural sciences from central Europe to its periphery and to the Middle East and Asian cultures. The book argues that the process of transmission of knowledge whether theoretical or practical was not a simple and one-way process from the donor to the receiver as it is often admitted, but a multi-dimensional and complex cultural process of selection and transformation where ancient scientific and local traditions and elements. The book explores the issue from a different geopolitical perspective, namely not focusing on a singular recipient and several points of distribution, namely the metropolitan centres of science, medicine, and technology, but on regions that are both recipients and distributors and provides new perspectives based on newly investigated material for historical studies on the cross scientific exchanges between different parts of the world.


On Their Own Terms

On Their Own Terms

Author: Benjamin A. Elman

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 0674036476

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.


The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857

Author: Margot Finn

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2018-02-15

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 1787350274

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.


China's Quest for Foreign Technology

China's Quest for Foreign Technology

Author: William C. Hannas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1000191613

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book analyzes China’s foreign technology acquisition activity and how this has helped its rapid rise to superpower status. Since 1949, China has operated a vast and unique system of foreign technology spotting and transfer aimed at accelerating civilian and military development, reducing the cost of basic research, and shoring up its power domestically and abroad—without running the political risks borne by liberal societies as a basis for their creative developments. While discounted in some circles as derivative and consigned to perpetual catch-up mode, China’s "hybrid" system of legal, illegal, and extralegal import of foreign technology, combined with its indigenous efforts, is, the authors believe, enormously effective and must be taken seriously. Accordingly, in this volume, 17 international specialists combine their scholarship to portray the system’s structure and functioning in heretofore unseen detail, using primary Chinese sources to demonstrate the perniciousness of the problem in a manner not likely to be controverted. The book concludes with a series of recommendations culled from the authors’ interactions with experts worldwide. This book will be of much interest to students of Chinese politics, US foreign policy, intelligence studies, science and technology studies, and International Relations in general.


Windows on the Chinese World

Windows on the Chinese World

Author: Clara Wing-chung Ho

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9780739127698

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Each chapter of this collection addresses a problem in Chinese history that is both interesting and important, as well as offering new ideas and interpretations, plus a methodological example that might inspire other scholars. The collective nature of this volume and the variety of its approaches and topics, plus the high quality of each chapter, make it accessible to scholars in a wide range of intellectual fields who may use from one to all chapters."--BOOK JACKET.