Java And Modern Europe

This book presents a case study of Europe's impact on an old and distinctive non-European civilisation. Part One deals with the elements in Europe's strength, technological, political and intellectual. It also uses Wallerstein's world-systems perspective to give an economic dimension to this picture of the new world of Europe, and then looks at the important question of the changing place of the Dutch in the new economic order from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. This is followed by a brief account of the history of the Dutch East-India Company in Java, and its political effects. Part Two deals with the nature of the Javanese ancien regime, both in court and in provincial circles, with a focus on society and civilisation, rather than those staples of Javanese historiography to date, political events and economic statistics. Part Three deals with the overall pattern set by the VOC's changing economic imperatives and with the impact of the successive tides of capitalism on three regional societies of Java. Part Four deals with intellectual shifts that took place in this period, and argues that these shifts were less conservative than the socio-economic ones described in Part Three and, though more fragile and vulnerable, were crucial for the future. The conclusion attempts to show the significance of these developments for modern Indonesia and the way in which some of the dynamics begun in this period are being played out in the contemporary world.

This book presents a case study of Europe's impact on an old and distinctive non-European civilisation. Part One deals with the elements in Europe's strength, technological, political and intellectual. It also uses Wallerstein's world-systems perspective to give an economic dimension to this picture of the new world of Europe, and then looks at the important question of the changing place of the Dutch in the new economic order from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. This is followed by a brief account of the history of the Dutch East-India Company in Java, and its political effects. Part Two deals with the nature of the Javanese ancien regime, both in court and in provincial circles, with a focus on society and civilisation, rather than those staples of Javanese historiography to date, political events and economic statistics. Part Three deals with the overall pattern set by the VOC's changing economic imperatives and with the impact of the successive tides of capitalism on three regional societies of Java. Part Four deals with intellectual shifts that took place in this period, and argues that these shifts were less conservative than the socio-economic ones described in Part Three and, though more fragile and vulnerable, were crucial for the future. The conclusion attempts to show the significance of these developments for modern Indonesia and the way in which some of the dynamics begun in this period are being played out in the contemporary world.

This book takes a new, interdisciplinary approach to analyzing modern Viennese visual culture, informed by Austro-German theater, contemporary medical treatises centered on hysteria, and an original examination of dramatic gestures in expressionist artworks. It centers on the following question: How and to what end was the human body discussed, portrayed, and utilized as an aesthetic metaphor in turn-of-the-century Vienna? By scrutinizing theatrically “hysterical” performances, avant-garde puppet plays, and images created by Oskar Kokoschka, Koloman Moser, Egon Schiele and others, Nathan J. Timpano discusses how Viennese artists favored the pathological or puppet-like body as their contribution to European modernism.

Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

Embodiment, Expertise, and Ethics in Early Modern Europe highlights the agency and intentionality of individuals and groups in the making of sensory knowledge from approximately 1500 to 1700. Focused case studies show how artisans, poets, writers, and theologians responded creatively to their environments, filtering the cultural resources at their disposal through the lenses of their own more immediate experiences and concerns. The result was not a single, unified sensory culture, but rather an entangling of micro-cultural dynamics playing out across an archipelago of contexts that dotted the early modern European world—one that saw profound transitions in ways people used sensory knowledge to claim ethical, intellectual, and practical authority.

The Hidden Force is a book by Louis Couperus. It gives a picture of life in the colonial Dutch East Indies in the wake of the nineteenth and the twentieth century.