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    Curious Encounters
    Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century

    Adriana Craciun (Edited by), Mary Terrall (Edited by)

    9781487503673

    Hardback, published 13 February 2019

    256 pages
    23.5 x 15.9 x 2.5 cm, 0.52 kg

    "Curious Encounters aims to ‘challenge assumptions about how metropolitan centers relate to distant peripheries’ by focusing on ‘agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, and specimens [that] moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power’ (9). From an essay about Ottoman horse culture to essays on the role of Inuit people in an 1811 missionary voyage to Ungava Bay and petitions by Indigenous Christians in seventeenth-century Peru, every essay in this collection meets this challenge in new and exciting ways."

    - Kelly Fleming, Kenyon College (Eighteenth-Century Fiction)

    With contributions from historians, literary critics, and geographers, Curious Encounters uncovers a rich history of global voyaging, collecting, and scientific exploration in the long eighteenth century. Leaving behind grand narratives of discovery, these essays collectively restore a degree of symmetry and contingency to our understanding of encounters between European and Indigenous people. To do this the essays consider diverse agents of historical change, both human and inanimate: commodities, curiosities, texts, animals, and specimens moved through their own global circuits of knowledge and power. The voyages and collections rediscovered here do not move from a European center to a distant periphery, nor do they position European authorities as the central agents of this early era of globalization. Long distance voyagers from Greenland to the Ottoman Empire crossed paths with French, British, Polynesian, and Spanish travelers across the world, trading objects and knowledge for diverse ends. The dynamic contact zones of these curious encounters include the ice floes of the Arctic, the sociable spaces of the tea table, the hybrid material texts and objects in imperial archives, and the collections belonging to key figures of the Enlightenment, including Sir Hans Sloane and James Petiver.

    Illustrations
    Acknowledgments

    Introduction
    ADRIANA CRACIUN AND MARY TERRALL

    1 The British Way of Tea: Tea as an Object of Knowledge between Britain and China, 1690–1730
        MARKMAN ELLIS

    2 Evliya Çelebi, Explorer on Horseback: Knowledge Gathering by a Seventeenth-Century Ottoman
        DONNA LANDRY

    3 Indigenous Voyaging, Authorship, and Discovery
        MICHAEL BRAVO

    4 The World in a Nicknackatory: Encounters and Exchanges in Hans Sloane’s Collection
        MILES OGBORN AND VICTORIA PICKERING

    5 A Slaving Surgeon’s Collection: The Pursuit of Natural History through the British Slave Trade to Spanish America
        KATHLEEN S. MURPHY

    6 From the Monumental to Minutiae: Serializing Polynesian Barkcloths in Eighteenth-Century Britain
        BILLIE LYTHBERG

    7 Formal Encounters: Education, Evangelization, and the Reproduction of Custom in Seventeenth-Century Peru
        MATTHEW GOLDMARK

    8 Stadial Environmental History in the Voyage Narratives of George and John Reinhold Forster
        NOAH HERINGMAN

    Contributors
    Index
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