Overview

With contributions from historians, literary critics, and geographers, Curious Encounters uncovers a rich history of global voyaging, collecting, and scientific exploration in the long eighteenth century. Leaving behind grand narratives of discovery, these essays collectively restore a degree of symmetry and contingency to our understanding of encounters between European and Indigenous people. To do this the essays consider diverse agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, animals, and specimens moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power. The voyages and collections rediscovered here do not move from a European center to a distant periphery, nor do they position European authorities as the central agents of this early era of globalization. Long distance voyagers from Greenland to the Ottoman Empire crossed paths with French, British, Polynesian, and Spanish travelers across the world, trading objects and knowledge for diverse ends. The dynamic contact zones of these curious encounters include the ice floes of the Arctic, the sociable spaces of the tea table, the hybrid material texts and objects in imperial archives, and the collections belonging to key figures of the Enlightenment, including Sir Hans Sloane and James Petiver.

Full Product Details

Author:   Adriana Craciun ,  Mary Terrall
Publisher:   University of Toronto Press
Imprint:   University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.90cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.520kg
ISBN:  

9781487503673

ISBN 10:   1487503679
Pages:   256
Publication Date:   13 February 2019
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction ADRIANA CRACIUN AND MARY TERRALL 1 The British Way of Tea: Tea as an Object of Knowledge between Britain and China, 1690–1730     MARKMAN ELLIS 2 Evliya Çelebi, Explorer on Horseback: Knowledge Gathering by a Seventeenth-Century Ottoman     DONNA LANDRY 3 Indigenous Voyaging, Authorship, and Discovery     MICHAEL BRAVO 4 The World in a Nicknackatory: Encounters and Exchanges in Hans Sloane’s Collection     MILES OGBORN AND VICTORIA PICKERING 5 A Slaving Surgeon’s Collection: The Pursuit of Natural History through the British Slave Trade to Spanish America     KATHLEEN S. MURPHY 6 From the Monumental to Minutiae: Serializing Polynesian Barkcloths in Eighteenth-Century Britain     BILLIE LYTHBERG 7 Formal Encounters: Education, Evangelization, and the Reproduction of Custom in Seventeenth-Century Peru     MATTHEW GOLDMARK 8 Stadial Environmental History in the Voyage Narratives of George and John Reinhold Forster     NOAH HERINGMAN Contributors Index

Reviews

Featuring an impressive list of contributors, the main purpose of Curious Encounters is a laudable one: to disseminate knowledge about early travellers and discoveries in less-trodden areas of the world. - Donald W. Nichol, Department of English, Memorial University of Newfoundland This book establishes the 'new geographies of knowledge and power' that transformed British culture, and those that eighteenth-century explorers encountered, read, and misread. Eighteenth-century specialists, those interested in British cultural history, and literature on voyaging and colonization will appreciate Curious Encounters. - Richard C. Taylor, Department of English, East Carolina University

"""Curious Encounters aims to ‘challenge assumptions about how metropolitan centers relate to distant peripheries’ by focusing on ‘agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, and specimens [that] moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power’ (9). From an essay about Ottoman horse culture to essays on the role of Inuit people in an 1811 missionary voyage to Ungava Bay and petitions by Indigenous Christians in seventeenth-century Peru, every essay in this collection meets this challenge in new and exciting ways."" -- Kelly Fleming, Kenyon College * <em>Eighteenth-Century Fiction</em> *"

Curious Encounters aims to 'challenge assumptions about how metropolitan centers relate to distant peripheries' by focusing on 'agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, and specimens [that] moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power' (9). From an essay about Ottoman horse culture to essays on the role of Inuit people in an 1811 missionary voyage to Ungava Bay and petitions by Indigenous Christians in seventeenth-century Peru, every essay in this collection meets this challenge in new and exciting ways. -- Kelly Fleming, Kenyon College * <em>Eighteenth-Century Fiction</em> *

Author Information

Adriana Craciun is the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of Humanities at Boston University. Mary Terrall is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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