Book Description

The Netherlands housed a number of widely-known, envied, and emulated centers of accumulation during the early-modern period. Raw and manufactured goods passed through Dutch port cities, linking the country to global cycles of accumulation and exchange. Its institutions of learning and culture similarly served as internationally famous centers of accumulation that furthered knowledge and cultural production, embodied in the form of books, maps, prints, exhibits, and the like. This collection of essays brings together the Dutch histories of manufacture, commerce, and global exchange along with the histories of knowledge and cultural circulation during the 17th and 18th centuries by anatomizing the multi-faceted concept of accumulation. The book explores the processes that led to the formation of concentrated, often hybrid, sites of material, intellectual, and cultural accumulation in the Netherlands and its overseas stations, as well as the concerns and consequences to which the successes and challenges of accumulation gave rise. It will be of interest to historians of science, technology, culture, and economics. (Series: Low Countries Studies on the Circulation of Natural Knowledge - Vol. 2)