Originally published in two volumes in 1980, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change is now issued in a paperback edition containing both volumes. The work is a full-scale historical treatment of the advent of printing and its importance as an agent of change. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times - the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise...

Georg Marggrafe (1610-1643) is today hailed as the principal author of an influential account of the natural history of Northern Brazil and as compiler of the first accurate map of the area, which is considered as one of the most elegant products of seventeenth-century Dutch cartography. But initial he had the ambition to become known in astronomy. With the support Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, then governor-general of colonial Dutch Brazil, he built in Recife the first European-style astr...

The remains of Dutch East India Company forts are scattered throughout littoral Asia and Africa. But how important were the specific characteristics of European bastion-trace fortifications to Early-Modern European expansion? Was European fortification design as important for Early-Modern expansion as has been argued? This book takes on these questions by studying the system of fortifications built and maintained by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in present-day India and Sri Lanka. It unc...

Julián Romero, Sancho Dávila, Cristóbal de Mondragón, and Francisco de Valdés were prominent Spanish military commanders during the first decade of the Revolt in the Low Countries (1567–1577). Occupying key positions in this conflict, they featured as central characters in various war narratives and episodical descriptions of the events they were involved in, ranging from chronicles, poems, theatre plays, engravings, and songs to news pamphlets. To this day, they still figure as protag...

The unpublished writings of a Dutch colonial official, Pieter Albert Bik (1798-1855) are studied and contextualized in this book. The remarkable autobiographical manuscript of Bik, which is here presented in English translation with annotations, provides a unique glimpse of the wide horizons of the world of Dutch colonialism, tracing his many journeys in Europe, the Dutch East Indies and Japan as well as across the oceans in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In this work, Mikko Toivan...

During the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln’s administration engaged in protracted negotiations with representatives of the Netherlands to aid in the voluntarily colonization of free African Americans to Suriname. Scores of diplomatic letters in Dutch, English, and French, dating to the period 1862 to 1866 attest to the very real possibility that such a migration stream could have become a reality. They also indicate reasons why this scheme failed: it was bogged down by differe...

A fully updated fourth edition written by a team of specialists. Enabling students to place early modern Europe within a global context and to see how Europe interacted with the broader early modern world through the exchange of ideas and goods. New chapters on Environment and Food and Drink Cultures which provides students and lecturers with a narrative history and new examples in these fields at an introductory level.

The companion website now includes a primary source resource section with...