Entrepreneurial science is not new; business interests have strongly influenced science since the Scientific Revolution. In Commercial Visions, Dániel Margócsy illustrates that product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and medicine—the “big sciences” of the early modern era—and argues that the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to an entrepreneurial network of transnational science. Margócsy introduces a number of natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Paris who, in their efforts to boost their trade, developed modern taxonomy, invented color printing and anatomical preparation techniques, and contributed to philosophical debates on topics ranging from human anatomy to Newtonian optics. These scientific practitioners, including Frederik Ruysch and Albertus Seba, were out to do business: they produced and sold exotic curiosities, anatomical prints, preserved specimens, and atlases of natural history to customers all around the world. Margócsy reveals how their entrepreneurial rivalries transformed the scholarly world of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace. Margócsy’s highly readable and engaging book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, global trade, art, and culture.

In "Commercial Visions," Daniel Margocsy shows how entrepreneurial science has been with us since the Scientific Revolution. Product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and anatomy, the big sciences of the early modern era, and the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to a transnational network of such entrepreneurial science, connecting natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in such cities as Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Danzig. These practitioners were out to do business: they bought and sold exotica, preserved specimens, anatomical prints, and botanical atlases, and in their trade relied on particularly mercantile innovations, including postal networks, shipping, public transportation, and international banking. They also developed their own infrastructure for managing the long-distance monetary exchange of scientific knowledge and curiosities, while entrepreneurial rivalries, secrecy, and marketing strategies transformed the honorific, gift-based exchange system of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace. Throughout this process, the Dutch naturalists contributed to the growth of modern science, imbuing its ethos and practices with financial undertones. "Commercial Visions "studies the interaction of commerce and science through the lens of recent scholarship on commodification, the circulation of knowledge, and the consumer revolution to argue that trade brought about a culture of scientific debate in the Netherlands that thoroughly influenced the visual epistemology of early modern science. Market competition pitted naturalists against each other, and compelled them to develop philosophical arguments to promote the representational claims of their imaging techniques. Margocsy s highly readable book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, culture, and art. "

Mark Gottdiener explores the nature of social change as it has developed since the 1960s as reflected in the "theming" of America, from Graceland to Dollywood, from Las Vegas to Disney World, from the Mall of America to your local mall. Nowhere can modern Americans escape the profusion of recognizable symbols and signs attached to virtually every aspect of their culture constantly reminding them that they are on familiar and comforting grounds. "Just come in, friend, and buy; make yourself at home," these symbols seem to say, thus tying media culture and the seduction of consumerism to the production of ingeniously designed symbolic spaces. This is the first book to explore the origins, nature, and future of themed spaces in our information-overloaded world. Gottdiener begins with a brief historical account of the shifting importance of themes in the construction of built space. He then evaluates the economic basis for the increasing reliance on symbols in the marketing of commercial enterprises and analyzes contemporary trends in themed restaurants, malls, airports, theme parks, museums, and war memorials. Final chapters are devoted to examining such critical issues as the disappearance of public space, the relation between themes and mass media industries, and the future of symbolic spaces.

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.

A concept of operations (CONOPS) for the Commercial and Business (CaB) aircraft synthetic vision systems (SVS) is described. The CaB SVS is expected to provide increased safety and operational benefits in normal and low visibility conditions. Providing operational benefits will promote SVS implementation in the fleet, improve aviation safety, and assist in meeting the national aviation safety goal. SVS will enhance safety and enable consistent gate-to-gate aircraft operations in normal and low visibility conditions. The goal for developing SVS is to support operational minima as low as Category IIIb in a variety of environments. For departure and ground operations, the SVS goal is to enable operations with a runway visual range of 300 feet. The system is an integrated display concept that provides a virtual visual environment. The SVS virtual visual environment is composed of three components: an enhanced intuitive view of the flight environment, hazard and obstacle detection and display.

Most people understand property as something that is owned, a means of creating individual wealth. But in Commodity and Propriety, the first full-length history of the meaning of property, Gregory Alexander uncovers in American legal writing a competing vision of property that has existed alongside the traditional conception. Property, Alexander argues, has also been understood as proprietary, a mechanism for creating and maintaining a properly ordered society. This view of property has even operated in periods—such as the second half of the nineteenth century—when market forces seemed to dominate social and legal relationships. In demonstrating how the understanding of property as a private basis for the public good has competed with the better-known market-oriented conception, Alexander radically rewrites the history of property, with significant implications for current political debates and recent Supreme Court decisions.

Looks beyond broadcasting's mainstream, toward cable's alternatives, to critically consider the capacity of commercial media to serve the public interest. This work offers an overview of the industry's history and regulatory trends, case studies of cable newcomers aimed at niche markets, and analyses of programming forms introduced by cable TV.

In Visions of Deliverance, Mayte Green-Mercado traces the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts known as joferes through formal and informal networks of merchants, Sufis, and other channels of diffusion among Muslims and Christians across the Mediterranean from Constantinople and Venice to Morisco towns in eastern Spain. The movement of these prophecies from the eastern to the western edges of the Mediterranean illuminates strategies of Morisco cultural and political resistance, reconstructing both productive and oppositional interactions and exchanges between Muslims and Christians in the early modern Mediterranean. Challenging a historiography that has primarily understood Morisco apocalyptic thought as the expression of a defeated group that was conscious of the loss of their culture and identity, Green-Mercado depicts Moriscos not simply as helpless victims of Christian oppression but as political actors whose use of end-times discourse helped define and construct their society anew. Visions of Deliverance helps us understand the implications of confessionalization, forced conversion, and assimilation in the early modern period and the intellectual and theological networks that shaped politics and identity across the Mediterranean in this era.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Britain celebrated its possession of a unique "empire of liberty" that propagated the rule of private property, free trade, and free labor across the globe. The British also knew that their empire had been built by conquering overseas territories, trading slaves, and extorting tribute from other societies. Set in the context of the early-modern British Empire, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism paints a striking picture of these tensions between the illiberal origins of capitalism and its liberal imaginations in metropolitan thought. Onur Ulas Ince combines an analysis of political economy and political theory to examine the impact of colonial economic relations on the development of liberal thought in Britain. He shows how a liberal self-image for the British Empire was constructed in the face of the systematic expropriation, exploitation, and servitude that built its transoceanic capitalist economy. The resilience of Britain's self-image was due in large part to the liberal intellectuals of empire, such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and their efforts to disavow the violent transformations that propelled British colonial capitalism. Ince forcefully demonstrates that liberalism as a language of politics was elaborated in and through the political economic debates around the contested meanings of private property, market exchange, and free labor. Weaving together intellectual history, critical theory, and colonial studies, this book is a bold attempt to reconceptualize the historical relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and empire in a way that continues to resonate with our present moment.

Galician audio/visual culture has experienced an unprecedented period of growth following the process of political and cultural devolution in post-Franco Spain. This creative explosion has occurred in a productive dialogue with global currents and with considerable projection beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the nation and the state, but these seismic changes are only beginning to be the subject of attention of cultural and media studies. This book examines contemporary audio/visual production in Galicia as privileged channels through which modern Galician cultural identities have been imagined, constructed and consumed, both at home and abroad. The cultural redefinition of Galicia in the global age is explored through different media texts (popular music, cinema, video) which cross established boundaries and deterritorialise new border zones where tradition and modernity dissolve, generating creative tensions between the urban and the rural, the local and the global, the real and the imagined. The book aims for the deperipheralization and deterritorialization of the Galician cultural map by overcoming long-established hegemonic exclusions, whether based on language, discipline, genre, gender, origins, or territorial demarcation, while aiming to disjoint the center/periphery dichotomy that has relegated Galician culture to the margins. In essence, it is an attempt to resituate Galicia and Galician studies out of the periphery and open them to the world.