Entangled Itineraries

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.

The book is a study in comparative intellectual history and discusses how socialist ideology emerged as an option of political modernity in the Balkans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.Focusing on how technologies of ideological transfer and adaptation work, the book examines the introduction and contextualization of international socialist paradigms in the Southeast European periphery. At its core is the presentation of three case studies (Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece), intertwined at times through similar, but also divergent paths. Each case aspires to tell a different and yet complementary story with respect to the issue of modernity and socialism. The book analyses the introduction of socialism against the background and in conjunction to other prominent options of political modernity such as nationalism, liberalism and agrarianism.

How and why early modern European artisans began to record their knowledge. In From Lived Experience to the Written Word, Pamela H. Smith considers how and why, beginning in 1400 CE, European craftspeople began to write down their making practices. Rather than simply passing along knowledge in the workshop, these literate artisans chose to publish handbooks, guides, treatises, tip sheets, graphs, and recipe books, sparking early technical writing and laying the groundwork for how we think about scientific knowledge today. Focusing on metalworking from 1400–1800 CE, Smith looks at the nature of craft knowledge and skill, studying present-day and historical practices, objects, recipes, and artisanal manuals. From these sources, she considers how we can reconstruct centuries of largely lost knowledge. In doing so, she aims not only to unearth the techniques, material processes, and embodied experience of the past but also to gain insight into the lifeworld of artisans and their understandings of matter.

Introducing materiality into the study of the history of medicine, this volume hones in on communities across the Indian Ocean World and explores how they understood and engaged with health and medical commodities. Opening up spatial dimensions and challenging existing approaches to knowledge, power and the market, it defines 'therapeutic commodity' and explores how different materials were understood and engaged with in various settings and for a number of purposes. Offering new spatial realms within which the circulation of commodities created new regimes of meaning, Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World demonstrates how medicinal substances have had immediate and far-reaching economic and political consequences in various capacities. From midwifery and umbilical cords, to the social spaces of soap, perfumes in early modern India and remedies for leprosy, this volume considers a vast range of material culture in medicinal settings to better understand the history of medicine and its role in global connections since the early 17th century.

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period. This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief. Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

This volume adds to the plurality of global histories by locating the global through its articulation and manifestation within particular localities. It accomplishes this by bringing together interlinked case-studies that analyse various temporal and spatial dimensions of the global in the local and the interactions between the local and the global. The case-studies apply a spatial approach to analyse how global questions of space, movement, networks, borders, and territory are worked out at a local level. The material draws on the Nordic countries, Europe, the Atlantic world, Africa, and Australia and ranges from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It is further divided into sections that address topics such as the translocality of humans and goods, local articulations of identities and globalities, parliamentarism and anti-colonialism, the organization of knowledge and the construction of spaces of representation and memory.

This book explores the dissemination of knowledge around Chinese medicinal substances from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries in a global context. The author presents a microhistory of the caterpillar fungus, a natural, medicinal substance initially used by Tibetans no later than the fifteenth century and later assimilated into Chinese materia medica from the eighteenth century onwards. Tracing the transmission of the caterpillar fungus from China to France, Britain, Russia and Japan, the book investigates the tensions that existed between prevailing Chinese knowledge and new European ideas about the caterpillar fungus. Emerging in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe, these ideas eventually reached communities of scientists, physicians and other intellectuals in Japan and China. Seeking to examine why the caterpillar fungus engaged the attention of so many scientific communities across the globe, the author offers a transnational perspective on the making of modern European natural history and Chinese materia medica.

The term 'jar' refers to any man-made shape with the capacity to enclose something. Few objects are as universal and multi-functional as a jar – regardless of whether they contain food or drink, matter or a void, life-giving medicine or the ashes of the deceased. As ubiquitous as they may seem, such containers, storage vessels and urns are, as this book demonstrates, highly significant cultural and historical artefacts that mediate between content and environment, exterior worlds and interior enclosures, local and global, this-worldly and otherworldly realms. The contributors to this volume understand jars not only as household utensils or evidence of human civilizations, but also as artefacts in their own right. Asian jars are culturally and aesthetically defined crafted goods and as objects charged with spiritual meanings and ritual significance. Transformative Jars situates Asian jars in a global context and focuses on relationships between the filling, emptying and re-filling of jars with a variety of contents and meanings through time and throughout space. Transformative Jars brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars with backgrounds in curating, art history and anthropology to offer perspectives that go beyond archaeological approaches with detailed analyses of a broad range of objects. By looking at jars as things in the hands of makers, users and collectors, this book presents these objects as agents of change in cultures of craftsmanship and consumption.