Toward a Global History of Soil unearths material expertise about soil in the early modern world that has remained largely unexamined outside of the study of agricultural history. Its eleven chapters reveal how experimental investigations transformed the economics of land administration, the treatment of disease, and hydraulic engineering. New methodologies to evaluate the productive qualities of soil led to radical changes in medicine, chemistry, botany, and household management. This book is the first to examine how the emergence of practical, systematic attempts to understand the nature of soil contributed to the development of early modern sciences.
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations and Tables
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Toward a Global History of Soil
Sciences, Practices, and Materialities, 13001750
Justin Niermeier-Dohoney and Aleksandar Shopov
Part 1: Translation and Transmission of Soil Knowledge
1 Imageries of Soil Practices in the Kashmiri-Language Mystical Poetry of
Shaykh Nuruddin (13701440) and Their Journey to the Persian Textual
Tradition
Between Agriculture and Sufi Mysticism
Zubair Khalid
2Soil Transformations in the Codex Vergara and the Codex de Santa María
Asunción
The Good Farmers of Sixteenth-Century Mexico
Sarah Newman
Part 2: Soil, Medicine, and the Body
3 Improving Soil and Healing the Body in Mamluk Egypt
Bird Droppings as a Universal Remedy
Heba Mahmoud Saad Abdelnaby
4 Soil Treatment in Two Late Ming Farming Manuals
Soil as Body
Jörg Henning Hüsemann
Part 3: Governing the Soil: Taxonomy, Expertise, and the State
5Understanding Soil in Ilkhanid and Post-Ilkhanid fila Books (13001600)
Himmet Takömür
6 Building Innovative Soil Knowledge to Improve Iberian Agriculture (1618th
Century)
Alberto González Remuiñán and Dulce Freire
7 Agricultural Manuals and the Economic Taxonomy of Soils in Early Modern
Poland
The Price of Soil Knowledge
Monika Kozowska-Szyc
Part 4: Soil, Specialization, and Experimental Culture
8 Marl and Alchemical Theories of Soil Fertility in Early Modern England
Transmuting the Soil
Justin Niermeier-Dohoney
9 Mastering the Soil and Measuring Flow in Early Modern Istanbul
Deniz Karaka
10Three Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Books on Flowers (ükfe-nme), Flower
Breeding (terbiye-i ezhar), and the New Science of Soil in Istanbul
Aleksandar Shopov and Himmet Takömür
11 Taste and the Quality of Soil in Early Modern South Asia
Flavors of Fertility
Nicolas Roth
Index
Justin Niermeier-Dohoney, Ph.D. (2018), University of Chicago, is an Assistant Professor of History at the Florida Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the history of early modern science with concentration on alchemy, agriculture, climate, and the environment.
Aleksandar Shopov, Ph.D. (2016), Harvard University, is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Binghamton University. He works on early modern Ottoman knowledge and practices related to plants, including such topics as flower breeding, grafting, urban farming, and riziculture.
