This is an innovative analysis of the agrarian world and growth of government in early modern Germany through the medium of pre-industrial society's most basic material resource, wood. Paul Warde offers a regional study of south-west Germany from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century, demonstrating the stability of the economy and social structure through periods of demographic pressure, warfare and epidemic. He casts light on the nature of 'wood shortages' and societal response to environmental challenge, and shows how institutional responses largely based on preventing local conflict were poor at adapting to optimise the management of resources. Warde further argues for the inadequacy of models that oppose the 'market' to a 'natural economy' in understanding economic behaviour. This is a major contribution to debates about the sustainability of peasant society in early modern Europe, and to the growth of ecological approaches to history and historical geography.

This is an original case study of how a peasant society in early modern Europe sustained its economy, which relied on natural resources. It offers a study of southwest Germany's dependence on wood, demonstrating the stability of the economy and social structure through periods of demographic pressure, warfare and epidemic.

Throughout the early modern period, scientific debate and governmental action became increasingly preoccupied with the environment, generating discussion across Europe and the wider world as to how to improve land and climate for human benefit. This discourse eventually promoted the reconsideration of long-held beliefs about the role of climate in upholding the social order, driving economies and affecting public health. Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World explores the relationship between cultural perceptions of the environment and practical attempts at environmental regulation and change between 1500 and 1800. Taking a cultural and intellectual approach to early modern environmental governance, this edited collection combines an interpretative perspective with new insights into a period largely unfamiliar to environmental historians. Using a rich and multifaceted narrative, this book offers an understanding as to how efforts to enhance productive aspects of the environment were both led by and contributed to new conceptualisations of the role of ‘nature’ in human society. This book offers a cultural and intellectual approach to early modern environmental history and will be of special interest to environmental, cultural and intellectual historians, as well as anyone with an interest in the culture and politics of environmental governance.

Early Modern Things supplies fresh and provocative insights into how objects – ordinary and extraordinary, secular and sacred, natural and man-made – came to define some of the key developments of the early modern world. Now in its second edition, this book taps a rich vein of recent scholarship to explore a variety of approaches to the material culture of the early modern world (c. 1500–1800). Divided into seven parts, the book explores the ambiguity of things, representing things, making things, encountering things, empires of things, consuming things, and the power of things. This edition includes a new preface and three new essays on ‘encountering things’ to enrich the volume. These look at cabinets of curiosities, American pearls, and the material culture of West Central Africa. Spanning across the early modern world from Ming dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan to Siberia and Georgian England, from the Kingdom of the Kongo and the Ottoman Empire to the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, the authors provide a generous set of examples in how to study the circulation, use, consumption, and, most fundamentally, the nature of things themselves. Drawing on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives and lavishly illustrated, this updated edition of Early Modern Things is essential reading for all those interested in the early modern world and the history of material culture.

Animals in rural Egypt became enmeshed in social relationships and made possible many tasks otherwise impossible. Rather than focus on what animals represented or symbolized, Mikhail discusses their social and economic functions, as Ottoman Egypt cannot be understood without acknowledging animals as central shapers of the early modern world.

Thoroughly updated edition of a best-selling, acclaimed book, placing early modern European history in a global and environmental context.

The environmental history of early modern times is a seminal and lively field of historical research. This volume offers ten concise essays that provide an overview of current research debates on a broad span of topics, such as historical climatology and climate reconstruction, coping with disaster, land use and agricultural knowledge, forest history, urbanization, the perceptions of (alpine) nature, and societal dealings with water and rivers. Taken together, the contributions establish early modern studies as a promising laboratory for new avenues in environmental history. (Series: Austria: Research and Science - History / Austria: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Geschichte - Vol. 10) [Subject: History, Environmental Studies]