Although concepts of space and time are socially constructed, they operate with the full force of objective fact and play a key role in processes of social reproduction. Conceptions of space and time are inevitably, therefore, contested as part and parcel of processes of social change, no matter whether that change is superimposed from without (as in imperialist domination) or generated from within (as in the conflict between environmentalist and economic standards of decision making). A study of the historical geography of concepts of space and time suggests that the roots of the social construction of these concepts lie in the mode of production and its characteristic social relations. In particular, the revolutionary qualities of a capitalistic mode of production, marked by strong currents of technological change and rapid economic growth and development, have been associated with powerful revolutions in the social conceptions of space and time. The implications of these revolutions, implying ...

Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination1

Introduction 1. Models for the memory 2. Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory 3. Elementary memory design 4. The arts of memory 5. Memory and the ethics of reading 6. Memory and authority 7. Memory and the book Afterword Appendixes List of abbreviations Bibliography.

The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

This essay, in two parts, argues for the centrality of historical thinking in coming to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises of the twenty-first century. Against the Anthropocene’s shallow hist...

The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis

The Sinews of power: war, money and the english state, 1688–1783

This article argues that medieval craft guilds emerged in order to provide transferable skills through apprenticeship. They prospered for more than half a millennium because they sustained interregional specialized labor markets and contributed to technological invention by stimulating technical diffusion through migrant labor and by providing inventors with temporary monopoly rents. They played a leading role in preindustrial manufacture because their main competitor, rural putting out, was a net consumer rather than producer of technological innovation. They finally disappeared not through adaptive failure but because national states abolished them by decree.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0022050700021124

Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe

The beer of today-brewed from malted grain and hops, manufactured by large and often multinational corporations, frequently associated with young adults, sports, and drunkenness-is largely the result of scientific and industrial developments of the nineteenth century. Modern beer, however, has little in common with the drink that carried that name through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Looking at a time when beer was often a nutritional necessity, was sometimes used as medicine, could be flavored with everything from the bark of fir trees to thyme and fresh eggs, and was consumed by men, women, and children alike, Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance presents an extraordinarily detailed history of the business, art, and governance of brewing. During the medieval and early modern periods beer was as much a daily necessity as a source of inebriation and amusement. It was the beverage of choice of urban populations that lacked access to secure sources of potable water; a commodity of economic as well as social importance; a safe drink for daily consumption that was less expensive than wine; and a major source of tax revenue for the state. In Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Richard W. Unger has written an encompassing study of beer as both a product and an economic force in Europe. Drawing from archives in the Low Countries and England to assemble an impressively complete history, Unger describes the transformation of the industry from small-scale production that was a basic part of housewifery to a highly regulated commercial enterprise dominated by the wealthy and overseen by government authorities. Looking at the intersecting technological, economic, cultural, and political changes that influenced the transformation of brewing over centuries, he traces how improvements in technology and in the distribution of information combined to standardize quality, showing how the process of urbanization created the concentrated markets essential for commercial production. Weaving together the stories of prosperous businessmen, skilled brewmasters, and small producers, this impressively researched overview of the social and cultural practices that surrounded the beer industry is rich in implication for the history of the period as a whole.

Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600-1600

List of Figures, Tables and Illustrations Preface List of Abbreviations THE PROBLEM AND THE PROPOSITION 1. Shipping, Productivity and Economic Growth, Jan Lucassen and Richard W. Unger PRODUCTIVITY TRENDS IN VARIOUS SHIPPING REGIMES 2. Productivity Changes in Shipping in the Dutch Republic: the Evidence from Freight Rates, 1550-1800, Milja van Tielhof and Jan Luiten van Zanden 3. The Strange Tale of the Decline of Spanish Shipping, Regina Grafe 4. Productivity in English Atlantic Shipping in the Seventeenth Century: Evidence from the Navigation Acts, Nuala Zahedieh 5. Institutions and the Environment: Shipping Movements in the North Sea/Baltic Zone, 1650-1800, David Ormrod 6. Productivity Change in Eighteenth Century Finnish Shipping, Jari Ojala 7. The Macau - Nagasaki Route (1570-1640): Portuguese Ships and their Cargoes, Rui Loureiro 8. Why Shipping "Declined" in China from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, Kent G. Deng 9. Operational Efficiencies and the Decline of the Chinese Junk Trade in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The Connection, Paul A. Van Dyke SOURCES OF PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH 10. Ship Design and Energy Use, 1350-1875, Richard W. Unger 11. Work on the Docks: Sailors' Labour Productivity and the Organization of Loading and Unloading, Jan Lucassen 12. Total Factor Productivity for the Royal Navy from Victory at Texel (1653) to Triumph at Trafalgar (1805), Patrick O'Brien and Xavier Duran 13. Sailors, National and International Labour Markets and National Identity, 1600-1850, Jelle van Lottum, Jan Lucassen and Lex Heerma van Voss 14. Characterization of Technological Change in the Shipping Industry, 1350-1800, Xavier Duran 15. Seaports as Centres of Economic Growth: the Portuguese Case, 1500-1800, Amelia Polonia Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

Shipping and economic growth 1350-1850

Herring exports to the Baltic from the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were closely related to exports of the previous year rather than to aggregate levels of trade. Dutch domination of the European market for salted herring in the seventeenth century thus cannot be explained by some external factor but rather by the internal nature of the Dutch fishery: by technology, organization, and the institutions which administered it. Regulation was designed to maximize rents but, as other fishermen gained the skills of their Dutch competitors, that strategy'turned into one which at first limited sales and then returns to the Dutch industry.… O, wot een gulden Neeringhen voedsel brengt ons toe de Conincklijke Heringh;hoe menig duysend ziel bij dezen handel leeft enwinnende sijn brood God dank en eere gheeft.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2120179.pdf

Richard W. Unger

Papers

Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600-1600

Shipping and economic growth 1350-1850

The Ship in the Medieval Economy, 600-1600

Dutch Herring, Technology, and International Trade in the Seventeenth Century