front cover of Oriental Networks
Oriental Networks
Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century
Bärbel Czennia
Bucknell University Press, 2021
Oriental Networks explores forms of interconnectedness between Western and Eastern hemispheres during the long eighteenth century, a period of improving transportation technology, expansion of intercultural contacts, and the emergence of a global economy. In eight case studies and a substantial introduction, the volume examines relationships between individuals and institutions, precursors to modern networks that engaged in forms of intercultural exchange. Addressing the exchange of cultural commodities (plants, animals, and artifacts), cultural practices and ideas, the roles of ambassadors and interlopers, and the literary and artistic representation of networks, networkers, and networking, contributors discuss the effects on people previously separated by vast geographical and cultural distance. Rather than idealizing networks as inherently superior to other forms of organization, Oriental Networks also considers Enlightenment expressions of resistance to networking that inform modern skepticism toward the concept of the global network and its politics. In doing so the volume contributes to the increasingly global understanding of culture and communication.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
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Letters of James Watt and Joseph Black
James Watt and Joseph Black
Harvard University Press

,The scientific correspondence of Watt, Black, Robison and others, together with James Watt's notebook of experiments on heat, edited by Eric Robinson and Douglas McKie.,

, The close friendship that grew up between Dr. Joseph Black, the,discoverer of specific and latent heats, and James Watt, the scientific instrument maker who was destined to become perhaps the greatest engineer of all time, is in,itself a dramatic relationship, not before fully appreciated, Here for the first time is the full text of all their surviving correspondence, known only fragmentarily before in J. P. Muirhead's Life and Mechanical Inventions of James Watt, and there rather freely amended by the editor.,

The amazing range of Watt's interests--in the firing of delft and stoneware, the manufacture of alkali from salt, the invention of scientific instruments as well as the copying press, and many other matters beside the steam-engine--is revealed here. Watt's own position as a scientist and the quality of his association with Black in further experiments on latent heat are fully documented. But the,correspondence is also valuable for the light it sheds on many aspects of life in Britain in the later half of the eighteenth century.

In addition, Watt's notebook on his experiments on heat, known before only through quotation, is presented complete. This is a primary source of first-rate importance to the historian of science.

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