What has driven humanity to expand across the globe? How was it achieved? And what has it meant to be on the receiving end - not the explorer but the explored?
In a work that spans more than 5,000 years, these questions are addressed by 38 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. Aided by a wide range of case material, they illustrate the meaning of exploration in a global context from antiquity to the present day. Individual volume editors ensure of the cohesion of the whole and, to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in a single volume, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.
The six volumes cover: 1. Antiquity; 2. The Middle Ages; 3. The Early Modern Age; 4. The Age of Expansion and Enlightenment; 5. The Industrial Age; 6. The Modern Age.
Themes (and chapter titles) are: Technologies of Exploration; Motivations and Methodologies for Exploration; Ideal and Idealized Explorer Typologies; The Explored and their Explorations; Verbalizing Exploration; Visualizing Exploration; and Authority, Finance, and Exploration.
The page extent for the set is approximately 1,500 pp. Each volume opens with notes on contributors and an extensive editorial introduction to the period and concludes with notes, bibliography and an index.
The Cultural Histories SeriesA Cultural History of Exploration is part of the Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available both as printed hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a one-off purchase and tangible reference for their shelves, or as part of a fully searchable digital library, updated twice a year and available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access. . See www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com for further information or to access content.
Beck, Lauren: - Lauren Beck holds the Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter and is Professor of Visual and Material Culture Studies at Mount Allison University, Canada where she teaches courses about maps, decolonization, empire, and food. She researches early modern intercultural encounters, particularly their racial and gendered implications, as well as place names, from Canada to Chile, to understand how identity connects with visual culture from different worldviews. She is the author of Canada's Place Names and How to Change Them (2022), and co-author of the recipe and culinary history book, Mitji: Let's Eat! Mi'kmaq Recipes from Sikniktuk (2023). Her previous books include Transforming the Enemy in Spanish Culture (2013), Illustrating el Cid, 1498-Today (2019), and Firsting in the Early Modern Atlantic World (2019). Her forthcoming works include the essay collection, Bridging Indigenous Studies and Hispanic Studies, and a thematic issue of the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, titled Re-Presenting Identities, Resistance and Transformation in the Globalized South: A Multidisciplinary Collective Approach to Decolonization. She is currently researching the bead ecosystem prior to and following the European invasion of the Americas.
