This provocative new history of early modern Europe argues that changes in the generation, preservation and circulation of information, chiefly on newly available and affordable paper, constituted an 'information revolution'. In commerce, finance, statecraft, scholarly life, science, and communication, early modern Europeans were compelled to place a new premium on information management. These developments had a profound and transformative impact on European life. The huge expansion in paper records and the accompanying efforts to store, share, organize and taxonomize them are intertwined with many of the essential developments in the early modern period, including the rise of the state, the Print Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and the Republic of Letters. Engaging with historical questions across many fields of human activity, Paul M. Dover interprets the historical significance of this 'information revolution' for the present day, and suggests thought-provoking parallels with the informational challenges of the digital age.

""The fear of obliteration obsessed the societies of early modern Europe," Roger Chartier writes in Inscription and Erasure. "To quell their anxiety, they preserved in writing traces of the past, remembrances of the dead, the glory of the living, and texts of all kinds that were not supposed to disappear."1 The efforts they made to confront this anxiety, however, paradoxically generated a new, related anxiety: the urge to preserve, record, and ward off obliteration frequently led to an unmanageable accumulation of texts, records, and ephemera of wildly varying utility and quality. Most of this was paper, which was not a new technology in early modern Europe but one whose use proliferated and diversified in these centuries. Paper, as never before, became the transactional medium; the repository of personal, communal, and institutional memory; the avenue of communication; the lifeblood of bureaucracies; and the foundation and residue of learning. Early modern Europeans, whether or not they sought to, and whether or not they were pleased with or trusted the new reality, put paper inscribed with text at the center of their lives"--

New illustrated and abridged edition surveys the communications revolution of the fifteenth century.

Between the end of the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution, the long-established structures and practices of European agriculture and industry were slowly, disparately, but profoundly transformed. Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe, first published in 1997, narrates and analyzes the diverse patterns of economic change that permanently modified rural and urban production, altered Europe's economy and geography, and gave birth to new social classes. Broad in chronological and geographical scope and explicitly comparative, the book introduces readers to a wealth of information drawn from thoughout Mediterranean, east-central, and western Europe, as well as to the classic interpretations and current debates and revisions. The study incorporates scholarship on topics such as the world economy and women's work, and it discusses at length the impact of the emergent capitalist order on Europe's working people.

Compares the archives of European states after 1500 to reveal changes in how records supported memory, authority and power.

What can the great crises of the past teach us about contemporary revolutions? Arguing from an exciting and original perspective, Goldstone suggests that great revolutions were the product of 'ecological crises' that occurred when inflexible political, economic, and social institutions were overwhelmed by the cumulative pressure of population growth on limited available resources. Moreover, he contends that the causes of the great revolutions of Europe—the English and French revolutions—were similar to those of the great rebellions of Asia, which shattered dynasties in Ottoman Turkey, China, and Japan. The author observes that revolutions and rebellions have more often produced a crushing state orthodoxy than liberal institutions, leading to the conclusion that perhaps it is vain to expect revolution to bring democracy and economic progress. Instead, contends Goldstone, the path to these goals must begin with respect for individual liberty rather than authoritarian movements of 'national liberation.' Arguing that the threat of revolution is still with us, Goldstone urges us to heed the lessons of the past. He sees in the United States a repetition of the behavior patterns that have led to internal decay and international decline in the past, a situation calling for new leadership and careful attention to the balance between our consumption and our resources. Meticulously researched, forcefully argued, and strikingly original, Revolutions and Rebellions in the Early Modern World is a tour de force by a brilliant young scholar. It is a book that will surely engender much discussion and debate.

News Networks in Early Modern Europe attempts to redraw the history of European news communication in the 16th and 17th centuries. News is defined partly by movement and circulation, yet histories of news have been written overwhelmingly within national contexts. This volume of essays explores the notion that early modern European news, in all its manifestations – manuscript, print, and oral – is fundamentally transnational. These 37 essays investigate the language, infrastructure, and circulation of news across Europe. They range from the 15th to the 18th centuries, and from the Ottoman Empire to the Americas, focussing on the mechanisms of transmission, the organisation of networks, the spread of forms and modes of news communication, and the effects of their translation into new locales and languages.