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.

Describes the effect of human action on the world's environment.

How did early modern societies think about disasters, such as earthquakes or floods? How did they represent disaster, and how did they intervene to mitigate its destructive effects? This collection showcases the breadth of new work on the period ca. 1300-1750. Covering topics that range from new thinking about risk and securitisation to the protection of dikes from shipworm, and with a geography that extends from Europe to Spanish America, the volume places early modern disaster studies squarely at the intersection of intellectual, cultural and socio-economic history. This period witnessed fresh speculation on nature, the diffusion of disaster narratives and imagery and unprecedented attempts to control the physical world. The book will be essential to specialists and students of environmental history and disaster, as well as general readers who seek to discover how pre-industrial societies addressed some of the same foundational issues we grapple with today.

A new edition of a seminal work—one that explores crucial changes within Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century The early modern period was one of profound change in Europe. It was witness to the development of science, religious reformation, and the birth of the nation state. As Europeans explored the world—looking to Asia and the Americas for new peoples and lands—their societies grew and adapted. Eminent historian Henry Kamen explores in depth the issues that most affected those living in early modern Europe—from leisure, work, and migration to religion, gender, and discipline—and the way in which population change impacted the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the poor. The third edition of this pioneering study includes new and updated material on gender, religion, and population movement. Richly illustrated, this is essential reading for all those interested in early modern European society.

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

This is the first major study to comprehensively analyse English encounters with the New World in the sixteenth century and their impact on early English understandings of America and changing approaches to exploration and settlement. The book traces the dynamism of early English encounters with the Americas and the many cultural influences that shaped English understandings of the new lands across the Atlantic. It illustrates that rather than being a period of inconsequential colonial failure in the Americas, the sixteenth century was in fact an era of assessment, adaptation and application that culminated in the survival of the first Anglo-American colony at Jamestown. Encountering early America will appeal to students and scholars working on early English colonialism in North America and European cultural encounters with the New World.

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]