The Enlightenment's Animals
Nathaniel Wolloch
- Title
- Atlas of Material Life
- Subtitle
- Northwestern Europe and East Asia, 15th to 19th century
- Authors
- A. Vries-Baaijens
- Peer Vries
- Price
- € 55,00
- ISBN
- 9789087283544
- Format
- Paperback
- Number of pages
- 344
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 12 - 03 - 2020
- Dimensions
- 15.6 x 23.4 cm
- Discipline
- History, Art History, and Archaeology
- Also available as
- eBook PDF - € 128,99
A BRIEF INTRODUCTION
I GEOGRAPHY AND DEMOGRAPHY
Sizes
Physical geographies
Weather and climate
The tyranny of distance
The variability and unpredictability of life in the pre-industrial world
Population and population density
Life expectancy, health and disease
Violence
II ENERGY
Human labour power
The labour power of animals
Firewood
Peat
Coal
Gunpowder
Watermills
Windmills
Water and wind and their role in transport
III RESOURCES
Land use
Animals
Manure and night soil
Wood
Metals: iron and bullion
Frontiers and ghost acreages
IV AGRICULTURE
Agricultural labour force, the share of agriculture in GDP and urbanisation
The importance of food in budgets
Agricultural productivity
Agricultural systems: the example of China’s rice economy
Agricultural systems: the example of Great Britain’s wheat economy
What about Japan?
V EXCHANGES
Migration
Intercontinental migration
Slave trades and other involuntary migration
The demographic impact of European overseas migration
Chinese and Japanese overseas migration
The Columbian Exchange
Flows and stocks of bullion
Monetary systems
Technology and relative scarcities
Intercontinental commodity trade
A modern world-system?
A sinocentric alternative to Eurocentrism?
Intercontinental trade as an almost exclusively European affair
VI STAGNATION AND GROWTH
The tension between population and resources
Positive checks
Preventive checks: The European marriage pattern and East-Asian alternatives
Sustainability in Tokugawa Japan
A world without growth?
Efflorescences
Modern economic growth before the Industrial Revolution? The case of Song China, 976-127
Modern economic growth before the Industrial Revolution? The case of the Dutch Republic during its Golden Age
Sprouts of pre-modern growth?
VII SOURCES OF GROWTH? CHANGES IN PRODUCTION AND TRANSPORT
Increased production and productivity in agriculture
Industrious revolutions
Increased investment and micro-innovations
Improved human capital
A better measure of reality
Improved transport
Transport over land
Transport over water
Shipping on open seas
VIII SOURCES OF GROWTH? MARKETS AND STATES
Specialisation and market extension
Global market integration
A rise of capitalism?
A decline of the commons?
A decline of the guilds?
A rise of free labour?
Capitalists, capitalism, and the state
State formation, state capacity and empire
State formation and state capacity
Military strength
Empire building, and imperial disintegration
IX THE GREAT DIVERGENCE
The emergence of a new economic regime
New energy and new technology
Railroads and steam shipping
The wider impact of the new economic regime
Great Divergence and fossil-fuel ghost acreage
Exchanges
Migration during the great diverging
Great Divergence, trade ghost acreage, and Great Specialisation
Regional differences, change and continuity
Investment and Great Divergence
Did the Dutch Republic, Qing China or Tokugawa Japan have sufficient financial resources to industrialise?
FINAL COMMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Reviews and Features
“The Atlas of Material Life stands out on three points in particular. First, it introduces the practices, if not the fully developed methodology, of comparison between Europe and its quintessential East Asian “other” in an accessible, unobtrusive, and data-rich way. […] Second, Peer Vries is very good at dealing with quantification, something that is all too often regarded in global history studies as unnecessary pedantry. As in many previous publications, Vries draws the reader’s attention to the limits of the knowable, the illusions of exactness, the perils of estimates, and the strength of common sense in assessing claims of accuracy. […] Third, Annelieke Vries’s maps are always devised with a keen eye on the usefulness that the authors consider a defining feature of their Atlas. […] On the whole, this is a textbook in the best sense: useful in many different respects, pleasing in its visual appearance, and never concealing the personal voice of a committed scholar and teacher."
- Jürgen Osterhammel, University Professor, Freiburg University
“This book is impressive because of its wide scope, treating numerous aspects of the economic and societal history of very different countries over a long period. Best of all, however, is the fact that the data are systematically selected and presented in ways that make worldwide comparisons possible, especially between Europe and Asia. […] It was a very good choice to match the text with a variety of figures, considering the increasing popularity of data visualization. The figures are attractive ad effective, giving the reader quick impressions of important historical developments. […] The authors have done an excellent job by opening up the field of global economic history in this way.”
- Milia van Tielhof, Senior Researcher, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands
"The comparative data are very useful and sometimes on their own revealing. Having all this between two covers (or in one digital file) will be very handy for all those scholars who work in, or dabble in, macro-scale economic history. […] The subject matter – large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia – is of first-rate importance for world history."
– John McNeill, University Professor, Georgetown University
“Throughout the book, the data is presented clearly and succinctly, drawn from a very wide array of mostly secondary sources but organized in a manner that makes comparisons across space and time feasible. Much of that clear presentation is due to the work done by Annelieke Vries: she is responsible for all the excellent maps as well as the lay-out of the book. […] But its real value lies in making the very complex, often inaccessible and mostly incomparable data contained in those scattered sources simple, accessible and comparable, and that makes this a very welcome contribution to the arsenal of resources we can make use of in teaching but also in our research. We owe the Vrieses a dept of gratitude for doing this.”
- Anne Gerritsen, University Professor, University of Warwick, Leiden University
- Jürgen Osterhammel, University Professor, Freiburg University
“This book is impressive because of its wide scope, treating numerous aspects of the economic and societal history of very different countries over a long period. Best of all, however, is the fact that the data are systematically selected and presented in ways that make worldwide comparisons possible, especially between Europe and Asia. […] It was a very good choice to match the text with a variety of figures, considering the increasing popularity of data visualization. The figures are attractive ad effective, giving the reader quick impressions of important historical developments. […] The authors have done an excellent job by opening up the field of global economic history in this way.”
- Milia van Tielhof, Senior Researcher, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands
"The comparative data are very useful and sometimes on their own revealing. Having all this between two covers (or in one digital file) will be very handy for all those scholars who work in, or dabble in, macro-scale economic history. […] The subject matter – large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia – is of first-rate importance for world history."
– John McNeill, University Professor, Georgetown University
“Throughout the book, the data is presented clearly and succinctly, drawn from a very wide array of mostly secondary sources but organized in a manner that makes comparisons across space and time feasible. Much of that clear presentation is due to the work done by Annelieke Vries: she is responsible for all the excellent maps as well as the lay-out of the book. […] But its real value lies in making the very complex, often inaccessible and mostly incomparable data contained in those scattered sources simple, accessible and comparable, and that makes this a very welcome contribution to the arsenal of resources we can make use of in teaching but also in our research. We owe the Vrieses a dept of gratitude for doing this.”
- Anne Gerritsen, University Professor, University of Warwick, Leiden University
A. Vries-Baaijens, Peer Vries
Atlas of Material Life
Northwestern Europe and East Asia, 15th to 19th century
Large-scale comparative economic history of westernmost and easternmost Eurasia can be beneficial for the understanding of global history. This book provides a description of material life in North-western Europe and East Asia, for the period from the late fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, with a focus on developments in Great Britain and the Dutch Republic on the one hand and China and Japan on the other hand. With maps, tables, graphs and figures as a prominent and integral part of the book, it provides information, in an accessible format, on the main characteristics of the economic landscape of this period. It demonstrates the constraints to which all pre-industrial economies were subjected because of their dependence on organic natural resources but also the different ways in which the societies discussed dealt with those constraints. To provide a better understanding of this economy of limited possibilities, the final chapter of the book is devoted to the emergence of modern economic growth in Western Europe.
Authors
A. Vries-Baaijens
Annelieke Vries-Baaijens studied Physical Geography with a major in Cartography at Utrecht University. She defended her PhD in Mathematics and Computer Science at Delft University. Since 2010, she makes digital maps of historical subjects.
Peer Vries
Peer Vries was professor of Global Economic History at the University of Vienna from 2007 to 2016. Since 2016, he is Honorary Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He published widely on global economic history and on the Great Divergence.
