
Curious Encounters
Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century
University of Toronto Press
Published on 13. February 2019
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-1-4875-0367-3 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
"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)
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Toronto
Canada
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
With dust jacket
Dimensions
Height: 236 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
560 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4875-0367-3 (9781487503673)
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Adriana Craciun | Mary Terrall
Curious Encounters
Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century
E-Book
01/2019
1st Edition
University of Toronto Press
€65.95
Available for download
Persons
Adriana Craciun is the Emma MacLachlan Metcalf Chair of Humanities at Boston University.
Mary Terrall is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mary Terrall is a professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Content
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 Celebi, 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
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 Celebi, 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