Global Motion and the Production of Knowledge
Motion defined the world of early modern savants. Whether Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or English, they were taken by the new intellectual challenges and options of a world populated by people and objects moving over lands, oceans and heavens. How are we to
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Global Motion and the Production of Knowledge Ofer Gal and Yi Zheng
Abstract Motion defined the world of early modern savants. Whether Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or English, they were taken by the new intellectual challenges and options of a world populated by people and objects moving over lands, oceans and heavens. How are we to tell the history of knowledge at the eve of modernity giving this global experience its due?
1.1 Motion People living around the turn of the seventeenth century were experiencing motion in ways beyond the grasp of anyone less than a century earlier. Goods and people were crossing lands and oceans to distances never envisioned and in scales hardly imaginable by their recent predecessors. The earth itself was set in motion and the heavens were populated by a whole new array of moving objects: comets, moons, and sunspots. Even the motion of terrestrial objects – so close at hand and seemingly obvious – was being thoroughly reshaped. In the two centuries to follow, this incessant, world-changing motion would transform the creation, interpretation and dissemination of knowledge and the life and experience of the people producing it: savants, artisans, pilots, explorers and collectors. This volume comprises studies of this early modern drama of motion and transformation of knowledge.
O. Gal () Unit of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia e-mail: [email protected] Y. Zheng Chinese Studies, School of Humanities and Languages, The University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia e-mail: [email protected] O. Gal and Y. Zheng (eds.), Motion and Knowledge in the Changing Early Modern World, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7383-7__1, © Springer ScienceCBusiness Media Dordrecht 2014
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O. Gal and Y. Zheng
This drama was a global experience. It was not completely new: from the Mongol conquest of Eurasia linking the landmasses to the ‘age of discovery’ connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific, Asia, Europe, and finally the “New World” became inextricably bound. But by the middle of the sixteenth century, commerce, conquest and exploration across political and geographical borders turned these ties into a close-bound global economic and cultural network: Chinese-Indian spice trade was carried out by Dutch vessels; Peruvian silver, brought by the Spanish, monetized the Chinese economy; Portuguese merchant ships mediated the silk trade between China and Japan and took over internal exchange in the Indian Ocean; Chinese porcelain export dictated economy, finance and taste in both Europe and China. Porcelain trade is a particularly intriguing example of this essential integration: its production in Europe, and with it employment and prosperity, rose and fell according to the prices and availability of Chinese porcelain, themselves subject to Chinese internal political and military vicissitudes. Correspondingly, the style of high-end Chinese porcelain manufactured in Jingdezheng was modified to suit European taste
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