Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World presents a collection of 12 original essays that examine the circulation of objects across global regions and cultures from the 16th to 18th centuries. Features essays that represents an extremely wide cultural, geographical, and material scope while offering new insights into the specificity of early modern exchange Inspires broader questions about the disciplinary boundaries and frameworks of art history, visual culture, and material culture Presents innovative research that sheds new light on little-known historical objects and phenomena Calls into question traditional geographies and hierarchies associated with global exchange and challenges outdated center-periphery models

This volume comprises studies of the early modern drama of motion and transformation of knowledge. It is unique in taking its global nature as fundamental and contains studies of the theme of motion and knowledge in China, Europe and the Pacific from the 16th to the 18th century. People living around the turn of the 17th century were experiencing motion in ways beyond the grasp of anyone less than a century earlier. Goods and people were crossing lands and oceans to distances never envisioned and in scales hardly imaginable by their recent predecessors. The earth itself has been set in motion and the heavens were populated by a whole new array of moving objects: comets, moons, sun spots. Even the motion of terrestrial objects—so close at hand and seemingly obvious—was being thoroughly reshaped. In the two centuries to follow, this incessant, world-changing motion would transform the creation, interpretation and dissemination of knowledge and the life and experiences of the people producing it: savants, artisans, pilots, collectors.

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.

This edited collection is an interdisciplinary study of gems in the early modern world. It examines the relations between the art, science, and technology of gems, and it does so against the backdrop of an expanding global trade in gems. The eleven chapters are organised into three parts. The first part sets the scene by describing how gems moved around the early modern world, how they were set in motion, and how they were pulled together in the course of their travels. The second part is about value. It asks why people valued gems, how they determined the value of a given gem, and how the value of a gem was connected to its perceived place of origin. The third part deals with the skills involved in cutting, polishing, and mounting gems, and how these skills were transmitted and articulated by artisans. The common themes of all these chapters are materials, knowledge and global trade. The contributors to this volume focus on the material properties of gems such as their weight and hardness, on the knowledge involved in exchanging them and valuing them, and on the cultural consequences of the expanding trade in gems in Eurasia and the Americas.

For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.

The Global Lives of Things considers the ways in which ‘things’, ranging from commodities to works of art and precious materials, participated in the shaping of global connections in the period 1400-1800. By focusing on the material exchange between Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia, this volume traces the movements of objects through human networks of commerce, colonialism and consumption. It argues that material objects mediated between the forces of global economic exchange and the constantly changing identities of individuals, as they were drawn into global circuits. It proposes a reconceptualization of early modern global history in the light of its material culture by asking the question: what can we learn about the early modern world by studying its objects? This exciting new collection draws together the latest scholarship in the study of material culture and offers students a critique and explanation of the notion of commodity and a reinterpretation of the meaning of exchange. It engages with the concepts of ‘proto-globalization’, ‘the first global age’ and ‘commodities/consumption’. Divided into three parts, the volume considers in Part One, Objects of Global Knowledge, in Part Two, Objects of Global Connections, and finally, in Part Three, Objects of Global Consumption. The collection concludes with afterwords from three of the leading historians in the field, Maxine Berg, Suraiya Faroqhi and Paula Findlen, who offer their critical view of the methodologies and themes considered in the book and place its arguments within the wider field of scholarship. Extensively illustrated, and with chapters examining case studies from Northern Europe to China and Australia, this book will be essential reading for students of global history.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, German clockwork automata were collected, displayed, and given as gifts throughout the Holy Roman, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires. In Animating Empire, Jessica Keating recounts the lost history of six such objects and reveals the religious, social, and political meaning they held. The intricate gilt, silver, enameled, and bejeweled clockwork automata, almost exclusively crafted in the city of Augsburg, represented a variety of subjects in motion, from religious figures to animals. Their movements were driven by gears, wheels, and springs painstakingly assembled by clockmakers. Typically wound up and activated by someone in a position of power, these objects and the theological and political arguments they made were highly valued by German-speaking nobility. They were often given as gifts and as tribute payment, and they played remarkable roles in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly with regard to courtly notions about the important early modern issues of universal Christian monarchy, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the encroachment of the Ottoman Empire, and global trade. Demonstrating how automata produced in the Holy Roman Empire spoke to a convergence of historical, religious, and political circumstances, Animating Empire is a fascinating analysis of the animation of inanimate matter in the early modern period. It will appeal especially to art historians and historians of early modern Europe. E-book editions have been made possible through support of the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.