Posts com a Tag ‘LIVESEY James (Aut)’

James Livesey | Imagem: University of Dundee

James Livesey’s Provincializing Global History: Money, Ideas, and Things in the Languedoc, 1680-1830 examines the ways significant knowledge shifts amongst ordinary men and women tied into, and helped create and solidify, deep economic change in the long eighteenth century. Part of making that argument for Livesey entails tying changes in culture in a specific place, here Languedoc, to broader economic development and transformation. The questions he lays out – how and why did the economic and industrial movements that originated in Western Europe come to capture and then dominate global economic activity and culture – are ones that many historians puzzle over in some fashion or another. For Livesey, answers lie in understanding the experiences of the subaltern, peasants and more generally ordinary folks in Languedoc, and the ways they connected to, understood and eventually participated in and transformed knowledge culture and economic development. He makes the argument that technological and scientific advances were not predicated solely, or even primarily, on inventions themselves and how effective they were. Rather a supportive local political environment, and the local adaptation of new technologies to the particular conditions of a place, made change possible. Livesey examines three examples of local transformation, connected to broader shifts, that connected the population of Languedoc to broad shifts in thought and practice developed and adopted elsewhere in order to trace how the provincial shaped and responded to global history. The three examples roughly correspond to the subtitle of the book – money (provincial debt holding), ideas (botany), and things (swing plow). Leia Mais