Harold J. Cook is director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine and professor at University College London. He lives in London.
""Matters of Exchange" is a magisterial book linking science
andcommerce.From now on, 'the Scientific Revolution' has a Dutch
accent." Mary E. Fissell, Johns Hopkins University
--Mary E. Fissell"
"Cook challenges existing interpretations of the rise of science
during the early modern period and provides an immensely
informative overview of science and medicine in the Dutch Golden
Age." Mark Harrison, University of Oxford
--Mark Harrison"
"Ever since the seventeenth century, the startling Dutch
achievement in arts and economy has obsessed foreign observers: how
to explain and learn from this seemingly miraculous rise to world
power of a small nation lacking any obvious natural resources? In
this powerfully argued and carefully organised new book, Hal Cook
makes the Dutch Golden Age somewhat less miraculous but much more
fascinating. By charting the networks and values embodied in what
he calls its information economy, Cook guides us along the
remarkable paths of trade and intelligence which dominated Dutch
society's successes and ambitions. Busy merchants and ambitious
scholars scoured their expansive world for new goods, new facts and
thus new opportunities for trade and commerce. The results were
visible in the shops, libraries, gardens and colleges of the new
Republic. Their orientation towards reliable information, mobile
credit and solid commodities affected not only global trade but
also world-wide knowledge systems. With lucid detail and appealing
illustration, Cook introduces key figures in the Dutch information
economy: pharmacists and botanists, anatomists and mariners.
Familiar protagonists of the new sciences of early modern Europe,
including Rene Descartes and Hermann Boerhaave, are here properly
put back into the milieux that mattered to their schemes for human
welfare and the improvement of knowledge. The book's stage is set
wide, from the Dutch bases in east Asia, southern Africa and the
Americas to the wharves, theatres and markets of the great
Netherlands cities. By insisting with such authority on the mutual
relationship between global commerce and worldly knowledge, Cook
opens a quite new perspective on the roots of the modern system of
science and capital." Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
--Simon Schaffer"
"In this ground-breaking book, Professor Cook investigates the way
in which the unprecedented growth in global knowledge in the
Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries accompanied,
and reflected the rapid expansion of the Dutch global commercial
empire. Meticulously tracking the relations between these two areas
of activity, Cook argues vividlyand convincingly that in the case
of medicine, commerce and the rise of a recognisable modern
practice went hand in hand, and that, in general, across Europe, a
new global economy marked the beginnings of science as we know it.
A book of real importance for all cultural historians and
historians of science of the early modern period." Lisa Jardine,
Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, and Centenary
Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary, University of
London
[You are welcome to edit my text]
--Lisa Jardine"
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