Wow! eBook
Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy in the East and the West: 10
Author(s): Maarten Prak (Editor), Jan Luiten van Zanden
- Publisher: Brill
- Publication Date: 30 May 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 372 pages
- ISBN-10: 9004245359
- ISBN-13: 9789004245358
Book Description
Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy investigates how technological skills and knowledge were reproduced and disseminated in the advanced agrarian societies of China, India, Russia and Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. The book offers regional surveys of Europe, China and India, as well as comparative studies of building, porcelain manufacturing, instrument making, printing, and shipbuilding. The authors engage with the on-going debate about the ‘great divergence’ between Asia and Europe, and its possible causes. Technology has so far had a minor role in that debate. This book is bound to change that, through the bold claims made by various contributors.
Contributors are: Karel Davids, S.R. Epstein †, Gijs Kessler, Jan Lucassen, Christine Moll-Murata, Patrick O’Brien, Kenneth Pomeranz, Maarten Prak, Tirthankar Roy, Richard Unger, and Jan Luiten van Zanden.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Maarten Prak is professor of Social and Economic History at Utrecht University. His publications include The Dutch Republic in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press 2005; 2nd edition 2014; Chinese translation 2013), editor, with Catharina Lis, Jan Lucassen, Hugo Soly, Craft guilds in the early modern Low Countries: work, power and representation (Ashgate 2006), and editor, with S.R. Epstein, Guilds, innovation and the European economy, 1400-1800 (Cambridge University Press 2008).
Jan Luiten van Zanden is Faculty professor of Global Economic History at Utrecht University and Honorary Professor at the universities of Groningen (NL) and Stellenbosch (SA). Among his recent books are The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: The European Economy in a Global Perspective, 1000-1800 (Brill 2009), with Arthur van Riel, The Strictures of Inheritance. The Dutch Economy in the Nineteenth Century(Princeton University Press 2004), and with Daan Marks, An Economic History of Indonesia 1800-2010 (Routledge 2012; Indonesian translation 2013).
