Overreaches

A doctor in Hamburg sets out on a search for Turkish battle drugs; three travellers to East India concoct an »unheard-of« elixir in a pharmacy on Java; Leibniz, the philosopher, tries to find the earliest Chinese scripts; Spaniards in Potosí, Peru, are forced to witness devil worship in the mines; a Jesuit missionary encounters an eastern Hermeticism in Isfahan; a heterodox adventurer delivers a secret manuscript to the Moroccan ambassador and a collector of the Lord’s Prayer becomes exasperated with the vocabulary of the African Khoisan peoples.

What distinguishes these pre-modern pioneers of 17th and 18th century globalisation? How do they succeed or fail in referencing the foreign and distant objects they deal with? How did the ideas that reached them travel through space and time? In his new book, Martin Mulsow interprets the early modern period as a time of overreaches, an epoch in which sources and news from near and far overlapped without anyone coming to terms with this duplication or sometimes even noticing it. It was an age of risky reference, which Mulsow brings to life before our eyes in a stirring and erudite way.

»How could one write a global history of ideas without falling back into Eurocentrism? Martin Mulsow’s book has an answer.« Oliver Weber, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»an exceptionally stimulating book« Jürgen Osterhammel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

»In his excellent book Overreaches, Martin Mulsow shows the conditions under which globality emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries and how knowledge transfer works.« Die Presse

»An extremely exciting and erudite book ... Overreaches reads like an adventure novel in places.« Deutschlandfunk