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Strangers Nowhere in the World - The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Paperback)
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Strangers Nowhere in the World - The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Paperback)
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The mingling of aristocrats and commoners in a southern French
city, the jostling of foreigners in stock markets across northern
and western Europe, the club gatherings in Paris and London of
genteel naturalists busily distilling plants or making air pumps,
the ritual fraternizing of "brothers" in privacy and even
secrecy-Margaret Jacob invokes all these examples in Strangers
Nowhere in the World to provide glimpses of the cosmopolitan ethos
that gradually emerged over the course of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Jacob investigates what it was to be
cosmopolitan in Europe during the early modern period. Then-as
now-being cosmopolitan meant the ability to experience people of
different nations, creeds, and colors with pleasure, curiosity, and
interest. Yet such a definition did not come about automatically,
nor could it always be practiced easily by those who embraced its
principles. Cosmopolites had to strike a delicate balance between
the transgressive and the subversive, the radical and the
dangerous, the open-minded and the libertine. Jacob traces the
history of this precarious balancing act to illustrate how ideals
about cosmopolitanism were eventually transformed into lived
experiences and practices. From the representatives of the
Inquisition who found the mixing of Catholics and Protestants and
other types of "border crossing" disruptive to their authority, to
the struggles within urbane masonic lodges to open membership to
Jews, Jacob also charts the moments when the cosmopolitan impulse
faltered. Jacob pays particular attention to the impact of science
and merchant life on the emergence of the cosmopolitan ideal. In
the decades after 1650, modern scientific practices coalesced and
science became an open enterprise. Experiments were witnessed in
social settings of natural inquiry, congenial for the inculcation
of cosmopolitan mores. Similarly, the public venues of the stock
exchanges brought strangers and foreigners together in ways
encouraging them to be cosmopolites. The amount of international
and global commerce increased greatly after 1700, and luxury tastes
developed that valorized foreign patterns and designs. Drawing upon
sources as various as Inquisition records and spy reports, minutes
of scientific societies and the writings of political
revolutionaries, Strangers Nowhere in the World reveals a moment in
European history when an ideal of cultural openness came to seem
strong enough to counter centuries of chauvinism and xenophobia.
Perhaps at no time since, Jacob cautions, has that cosmopolitan
ideal seemed more fragile and elusive than it is today.
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