In Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences Karel Davids offers a new perspective on technological change in China and Europe before the Industrial Revolution. This book makes an innovative contribution to current debates on the origins of the 'Great Divergence' between China and Europe and the ' Little Divergence' within Europe by analysing the relationship between the evolution of technical knowledge and religious contexts. It deals with the question to what extent disparities in the evolution of technical knowledge can be explained by differences in religious...

In The Circulation of Knowledge Between Britain, India and China, twelve scholars examine how knowledge, things and people moved within, and between, the East and the West from the early modern period to the twentieth century. The collection starts by looking at the ways and means that knowledge circulated, first in Europe, but then beyond to India and China. It engages the knowledge and encounters of those Europeans as they moved across the globe. It participates in the attempt to open up more nuanced and balanced trajectories of colonial and post-colonial encounters. By focusing on...

Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts brings together scholars who shed light on the ways locations gave shape to scientific knowledge practices in the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This interdisciplinary volume uses four hundred years of Dutch history as a laboratory to investigate spatialized understandings of the history of knowledge. By conceptualizing locations of knowing as time-specific configurations of actors, artefacts, and activities, contributors to this volume not only examine cities as specific kind of locations, but also analyze the regionally and...