Alfred W. Crosby

The measure of reality : quantification and Western society, 1250-1600

Part I. Pantometria Achieved: 1. Pantometria, an introduction 2. The venerable model 3. Necessary, but insufficient 4. Time 5. Space 6. Mathematics Part II. Striking the Match: Visualization: 7. Visualization, an introduction 8. Music 9. Painting 10. Bookkeeping Part III. The New Model.

A Renaissance Change in European Cognition

I do not entirely agree with Kissingers interpretation, and I am convinced that the divergence of Western and other cultures in this matter began long before Sir Isaac Newton, but the statement provides a good place to begin. This way of thinking about reality, distinctively Western until the last decades of the 19th century, is part and parcel of what we in the industrial nations call common sense, although we know, or should know, that it was not common historically nor does it always make sense. It provided the conceptual base for all modern science and technology except the most recent and exotic, for business and bureaucratic practice to this day, and for most of

Masters of Energy

Afew years ago the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented the Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology to Professor Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba. He deserved it. Smil is one of our more trustworthy guides in an era in which the leaders and citizens of the most powerful societies are stumbling myopically between the exact disciplines that provide concrete answers and the inexact disciplines that provide, or are supposed to provide, less tangible benefits such as beauty, warmth, and wisdom. Energy in Nature and Society is filled with facts, measurements, and brief but accurate descriptions of dozens of techniques, which when combined, force facts to make sense. The book is an excellent review for graduates of, say, MIT, whose memory of “energetics of complex systems” has grown dim, and it is a sterling introduction to that subject for those of us who majored in English literature. Smil situates all this information in the deep soil of humanity’s past experience, from the Paleolithic to the present. As a confident scientist he tells us that horses are powerful, people are powerful, atomic energy plants are powerful—and the energy of these wildly different entities can be ranked with the same measurements. Did you know that a healthy man, the biped, is the best marathon runner of all large animals? That is because he sweats so efficiently. Have you ever thought of measuring a human mother’s milk for its energy content? See page 126. This book could supply the foundation for a full undergraduate college course in energetics. It begins with a proper introduction to the subject of energy and to the means by which we measure and analyze its manifestations. The next chapters provide us with a brief outline of the intellectual origins of the field, then acquaint us with the subject on a solar and planetary level, and finally lead us to our planet and the mysteries of photosynthesis, which underlies nearly all known life. Once these formalities are completed, Smil demonstrates how we exploited all the above to make ourselves something new among animals, how we developed agriculture, and how we came to occupy most of the regions of the planet’s continents within the last 10,000 years.

Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (review)

historiography away from the founding of the Royal Society and the late seventeenth century. In many ways, the real action, as he illustrates, was happening much earlier. For Ash, the expert fusion between practice and theory found its most codified and systematized realization in Bacon. Indeed, Bacon was inventing himself as the expert’s philosophical expert mediator. In sum, this book is well researched, well written, and stimulating, and it will appeal to a wide audience.

Virginia DeJohn Anderson. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 322.

At first glance, Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the environmental history of early America; on closer observation, the work is very much more than this. Indeed, it is more a cultural history than an environmental history. Focusing on the first seventyfive years of English colonisation, Anderson examines the ways in which ‘animals not only produced changes in the land but also in the hearts and minds and behavior of the peoples who dealt with them’ (p. 5).

37.50

At first glance, Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the environmental history of early America; on closer observation, the work is very much more than this. Indeed, it is more a cultural history than an environmental history. Focusing on the first seventyfive years of English colonisation, Anderson examines the ways in which ‘animals not only produced changes in the land but also in the hearts and minds and behavior of the peoples who dealt with them’ (p. 5).

Virginia DeJohn Anderson. Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 322.

At first glance, Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the environmental history of early America; on closer observation, the work is very much more than this. Indeed, it is more a cultural history than an environmental history. Focusing on the first seventyfive years of English colonisation, Anderson examines the ways in which ‘animals not only produced changes in the land but also in the hearts and minds and behavior of the peoples who dealt with them’ (p. 5).

37.50Reviews of Books and FilmsCanada and the United States

esting. Another part of the task is reevaluating the balance of power in different colonial contexts. To this end, several essays focus not so much on regional dynamics as on administrative practices, imperial political cultures, and local processes of political negotiation. These contributions, in particular, provide a clearer sense of changes over time. David J. Weber, for example, examines late eighteenth-century Indian policy in northern New Spain. His thoughtful and provocative piece explores Spain’s struggle to reconcile new Enlightenment-era ideas of governance and local sovereignty with the need to secure a vulnerable frontier. Wim Klooster’s article on the Dutch looks at colonial power in the absence of a centralized state, and also emphasizes contrasts between the practices of the East and West India Companies. Leslie Choquette and Philip P. Boucher show that French settlers in North America and the Caribbean were able to defend their own interests despite their king’s notion of absolutism. Elizabeth Mancke charts three periods in British practices of imperial negotiation that are expertly tied to global events. This collection is highly recommended. Specialists will appreciate the new work on debates that are central to their aelds, but, more important, Negotiated Empires offers an accessible, comprehensive, and challenging introduction for non-specialists in one volume. It is a timely and welcome addition to the literature available on world history, Atlantic history, and other comparative or topical concerns.

:Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America.

TYLER COWEN. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the Worlds Cultures. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. vii, 179. 827.95 (US); PETER SINGER. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii, 235.

A Pest in the Land: New World Epidemics in Global Perspective (review)

21.95 (US).