Agriculture and the Making of Sciences 1100 170001 Toward a Global History Soil

When people worked with soil across the Americas and Afro-Eurasia from 1100-1800 new knowledge was unleashed that would change history. Eleven chapters show examples of how soil knowledge contributed to the development of chemistry, hydraulic engineering, botany, mysticism, and medicine. 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.