This chapter proposes that the myths of Hephaistos, the ancient Greek god of metalwork and the only physically impaired member of the Olympic pantheon, can provide insights into ancient inspirations for and understandings of assistive technology. It explores the range of different types of assistive technology that impaired and disabled individuals used in classical antiquity to facilitate their physical mobility, covering staffs, sticks, crutches, corrective footwear, extremity prostheses, conveyances, equids, bearers, and caregivers. It notes the frequent association of impairment and technology in classical antiquity. It argues for a reassessment of the suitability of the Medical Model for use in relation to impairment and disability in classical antiquity under certain circumstances.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

This chapter surveys the evidence for the design, commission, and manufacture of prostheses and assistive technology in classical antiquity. It argues that rather than being considered therapeutic and thus the responsibility of a medical practitioner, as is the case today, acquiring a prosthesis or other type of assistive technology was the responsibility of the user, and it was up to them to enlist the services of one or more artisans in order to do so. Consequently, ancient assistive technology was highly individualised and personalised, and was used to make statements about the individual in question's wealth, status, and sophistication. It covers artisans, inspirations, materials, and meanings.

Chapter 2 establishes the context usually neglected by histories of agricultural literature: how farming was learned without books in the prevailing system of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the discourse on the ‘mystery of husbandry’ (and closely associated discourse of ‘secrets’), a term denoting the knowledge and skills acquired by experienced practitioners that were inaccessible to amateurs, to both elucidate contemporary beliefs about learning through labour and to indicate the ways in which the publication of husbandry manuals disrupted existing notions of expertise. In doing so, it explores the parallels between craft and farming knowledge and borrows ideas from modern studies to argue that early modern husbandmen and housewives would have possessed a ‘peasant epistemology’ analogous to an ‘artisanal epistemology’. The chapter argues that when linked to broader socio-economic changes in farming, the emergence of the term ‘mystery of husbandry’ in the seventeenth century can be seen as a symptom of tectonic shifts in the social system of agricultural knowledge. In short, the knowledge of husbandry was being commodified in an increasingly competitive commercial environment.

The status of the knowledge of early modern craft practitioners and artisans has long been a point of contention among scholars, and several historians recently have argued that artisanal knowledge was central to the emergence of early modern science. This chapter follows attitudes towards craft practitioners and artisans, beginning in antiquity, when many philosophers argued that practical knowledge (techne) was of lesser value than theoretical knowledge (episteme). Following the elevation of the mechanical arts in the Middle Ages and the proliferation of practical how-to manuals in the Renaissance, a growing appreciation for artisanal work grew among philosophers. Renaissance humanists elevated the intellectual status of artistic practice, and iconoclasts like Paracelsus railed against knowledge gained without direct experience, praising instead the knowledge of miners and alchemists. Architects, engineers, and artisans came to embody the Renaissance ideal of the “polymath,” and practical knowledge became a central component of the philosophy of Francis Bacon, as well as the experimental science that was institutionalized by groups such as the Royal Society of London. Following postcolonial critiques of Eurocentrism, some have suggested the history of science should embrace a broader ambit that includes practitioners’ knowledge.

Examining the vibrant commercial sector of the economy as well as the busy transportation network that supported it, the third chapter demonstrates how canoes and pack animals enabled artisans and traders to reach local and distant markets. The transportation infrastructure also contributed to the ongoing vitality of exchanges in markets as well as the survival of specialist craft industries and commercial networks that connected Xochimilco to the wider global economy. Crucial to the provisioning of Mexico City, canoes and the dock facilities became key resources in the political economy of central Mexico even as haciendas increasingly replaced Nahua communities as the main source of Mexico City’s food supply by the early eighteenth century. Competition and conflicts developed among different interest groups, among them merchants, colonial officials, ecclesiastics, and Nahua communities, and the rowers of canoes emerged as key figures in the transportation system who could bargain and negotiate from a position of strength.

Chapter 3 develops the idea that contingent encounters are rooted in diversely transnational aesthetics of contingency, but also that this art invents new combinations or strategies specifically to exceed iconic visions. It focuses on work that generates contingency by involving local or regional traditions of weaving and ceramics, as well as artisans themselves. This chapter also addresses art that engages spectators through recent transnational practices, including interactions characteristic of uses of social media. I show that this work diverges from conventional understandings of chance aesthetics and participatory art. I also argue that participatory works exhibited in physical and virtual public spaces, as well as in galleries, blur the boundaries between sites which are conventionally viewed as separate and as associated with either art or activism. I explore contrasting means of evoking encounters between artist and artisans in work on Tunisia by Majd Abdel Hamid (textiles), Selma and Sofiane Ouissi (video performance) and Sonia Kallel (audio tour and video installation) I then address installations by Collectif Wanda, Mouna Jemal Siala and Wadi Mhiri, and Febrik, which involve spectators in ‘reordering space’ or in making alternative ‘icons’ of Tunisia today or of the revolutions in Tunis, Cairo and Damascus.

This chapter turns to the comic counterpart of Romeo and Juliet, written about the same time with as deep an engagement with Ovid. Dream, however, marks Shakespeare’s shift to thinking about Ovid’s bold, parrhesiastic verse and voice through the Metamorphoses rather than the Amores. Shakespeare taps Ovid’s poem of changes and changed bodies as his own, parallel contribution to the animated and parrhesiastic theater of his day, following and paralleling Marlowe. The chapter explores the trail-blazing path that Shakespeare’s Ovidian girls, Hermia and Helena, make in their pursuit of a dual goal: bold speech and marriage to the man of their desires. The dual goals are incompatible, as the chapter reveals. And so the Athenian and deeply Ovidian girls of the play hand the torch of parrhesiastic speech over to the artisan-actors, who perform the play within the play and participate in the huge send-up that Shakespeare’s acting troupe provides for those members of its aristocratic audience who have no respect for the craftsmen also in attendance to this play and others like it.

The great problem in writing about Proudhon and his Confessions of a Revolutionary is to find a “bottom line” – an interpretation that does justice to the changing views of this contrarian thinker without losing all coherence. Hyperbole and exaggeration are constants in Proudhon’s writing, but his message is generally moderate. The focus in this chapter is, first of all, on the contrast between Proudhon’s verbal violence and his skeptical and ironic attitude with regard to the views of self-proclaimed radicals. A constant is his rejection of the top-down radicalism epitomized by the “Jacobin socialist” Louis Blanc. In terms of Proudhon’s experience, the important point is that the revolution of 1848 drew him into a new life. It made him a representative of the people and an influential journalist. It made him the butt of attacks but also gave him a wider audience than he had ever previously enjoyed. He became the scapegoat of the right. But after the June Days, he also became the spokesman for “the people” betrayed by the revolution. His Confessions of a Revolutionary is both an account of his own making as a revolutionary and of the unmaking of the democratic revolution.

This chapter studies working life at Athens, sketching the range of occupations in the Athenian economy, from farming in the countryside to artisans, vendors, and purveyors of services in the city.

Inscriptions collected in this chapter demonstrate that women were employed in a wide range of occupations: not only were they engaged in gendered professions, as hairdressers, wet nurses and midwives, but they were also involved in more general vocations, for instance as physicians, albeit less frequently than men. Women were involved in trade and a limited number of crafts (primarily clothing and luxury production), and in education, entertainment and prostitution. Most working women we meet in inscriptions were freedwomen who had been trained as slaves. Their brief epitaphs advertise their professions as part of their social identity. Apart from funerary inscriptions, amphora stamps and painted messages on potsherds record the names of female ship owners and traders exporting wine and olive oil, brick stamps demonstrate their engagement as managers and owners of brick production and lead water pipes their management of lead workshops, graffiti advertise their services as prostitutes and wooden tablets their particpation in business transactions. Most testimonies are from Rome and the cities of Italy.

This chapter looks at Jingdezhen from the perspective of developments in the eighteenth century. This confirms some of the long continuities that have characterised the porcelain manufactures in Jingdezhen. Quantities of production mattered, as did the quality of what was produced, in the Song dynasty as it did in the Qing. Artisans moved between different sites of production, and so did the objects themselves, providing the inspiration for change, innovation and transformation. But that mobility and fluidity posed challenges for those in charge, and the written documentation created by those in power often served the attempt to order spaces, assert meaning onto those spaces, and regulate activity. Of course, continuity is not the only way to characterise what happened in Jingdezhen; far too much changed throughout the centuries, in terms of the spaces, the skills, the technologies, and the objects; their meanings were recreated constantly. By applying both local and global lenses to the exploration of these continuities and changing meanings, this chapter situates this city of blue and white in the early modern world.