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The period known as the ‘Golden Age of Cracow’ covered the first half of the sixteenth century and roughly coincided with the reign of King Zygmunt Stary (Sigismund the Old) from 1506 to 1548. The vigorous development of intellectual life in the city, combined with foreign contacts and a flourishing artistic life was supported by commercial prosperity. This was reflected on a larger scale within Poland, expressing itself in the wealth of the country and a favourable growth in foreign trade. Raw materials such as grain, timber, livestock, hemp, flax and potash led to a lively export trade, especially with the Low Countries and England; the production of raw materials, however, was in the hands of the propertied Polish nobility who were gradually becoming farming entrepreneurs. Here one sees the first hint of looming disaster for Cracow, which helped precipitate the city's decline. Not only in Poland but also in other parts of Eastern Europe, the nobility were taking advantage of the rural origins for raw materials such as grain and wresting control of them from urban merchants; in Poland the nobility decisively asserted its dominance over the towns which led to a steady flow of restrictions on the wealth and authority of such places as Cracow. The city also suffered from external factors; the great geographical discoveries had opened up new sea and ocean trade routes, while the old land routes, on which Cracow was so dependent, gradually diminished in importance. Moreover, following the Union of Poland and Lithuania in 1569, Cracow found itself tucked away in the south-west corner of Poland and had to cede its prime position in Poland to Warsaw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, New Granada lacked a substantial and influential merchant class of the kind found in Peru and Mexico. In 1695, a group of some twenty merchants in Bogotá had established a consulado de comercio modeled on those of Lima and Mexico City, by contracting with the crown to pay the royal tax known as the avería, due on goods imported by the galleons, in return for the right to a self-governing mercantile jurisdiction. The Consulado of Santa Fe de Bogotá did not survive for long, however. Its members were unable to fulfill their financial obligations, and when the galleon system itself collapsed during the War of the Spanish Succession the Consulado lost its rationale. It was suppressed in 1713, reflecting the inability of New Granadan merchants to sustain an institution of this kind. Many decades then passed before a consulado de comercio was reestablished in New Granada. When the institution was revived in 1795, it was at Cartagena de Indias, the country's leading port and home of its mercantile elite. Cartagena de Indias and New Granada's commerce Although Bogotá was the headquarters of New Granada's government, Cartagena was the hub of its commerce and throughout the eighteenth century the development of a mercantile elite in New Granada was primarily associated with this port. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, we have examined the structures of settlement, society, and economy in eighteenth-century New Granada and have seen something of the economic links that bound the colony to Spain. However, by focusing on the character of New Granada's social and economic structures, the foregoing chapters have tended to emphasize elements of continuity and evolution within the colony, without paying much attention to the external factors that affected its development. And yet, of course, the eighteenth century saw important changes in relations between Spain and her colonies, as the Bourbon kings who inherited the Hapsburg throne sought to reverse the seemingly inexorable process of decline that Spain had suffered during the seventeenth century. Not only did the new dynasty establish a more centralized and absolutist authority within the metropolis, but, by political, military, and economic reform, it also sought to bring about what has been called the “second conquest of America.” This was not a process that began immediately or proceeded smoothly. The first reforms were hesitant in tone and uneven in application, and the great age of reform did not arrive until the reign of Charles III. New Granada, however, felt the repercussions of change at the metropolitan center early in the century, when its trade and administration were touched by Madrid's earliest efforts to reassert control over the resources of its empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In France Cybèle has more worshippers than Christ. Higher agricultural education A perusal of nineteenth-century scientific literature, especially the journals, soon reveals the large role that science was capable of playing in agriculture and the degree to which farmers and all sorts of politicians were coming to rely on scientists to tell them how to increase production. The patron saint of French agricultural education is Mathieu de Dombasle, who opened near Nancy the first serious agricultural school in 1824. This noble failure encouraged the engineers Polonceau and Auguste Bella to found in 1828, with royal support, the more scientifically oriented Institution royale agronomique de Grignon, near Paris. In 1848 the Second Republic created a national organization of agricultural education: seventy departmental farm-schools to produce good farm workers; regional schools of agriculture; and, capstone of the system, the Institut national agronomique de Versailles. In line with policies in most western countries, the Third Republic promoted scientific agriculture on a scale unprecedented in French history. An autonomous Ministry of Agriculture emerged in 1881 from the clutches of the ministries in which it had been held captive for most of the century. Nineteen different ministers of agriculture served the forty-two governments that ruled France from 1881 to 1914. Given the composition of the Chamber of Deputies, it is not surprising that the ministry fell victim to a near monopoly by lawyers and doctors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technical progress is a function of bourgeois money. The functions of the faculties of science in the later nineteenth century were teaching, research, and service to agriculture, industry, and government at municipal, departmental, and national levels. An extra duty of faculties, resulting from the organization of a unified system of education and the historical connection between lycée and faculty, was their time-consuming responsibility for the baccalaureate examinations, a particularly heavy burden in large towns. The examination figures for the University of Paris in 1893–4 show the problem. Fortunately a light teaching load gave the French university scientist some time for research. Probably the most striking feature of the provincial faculties of science was the development of a system of institutes of applied science, each of which was usually headed by a leading scientist interested in regional industry and agriculture. The careers of Pasteur in Lille, Schützenberger in Mulhouse and in Paris, Haller in Nancy, Sabatier in Toulouse, and the Berthelots and Le Chatelier in Paris provide a paradigm of the activity of the academic scientist whose research was intimately connected with the economic life of the region and the nation. In developing institutes of applied science and technology the University saw itself as fulfilling a vital social function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States and elites The culture of the Ottoman period has often been analyzed by using the same criteria applied to the periods before and after it, Mamluk Egypt (1250–1517) and the nineteenth century. This is problematic for two reasons, firstly because of the very different roles played by the state in relation to culture and learning and secondly because of the role of elites in providing models and patterns of culture. The influence of the ruling class in shaping culture can change between one period and another, and can be greater at certain times than at others. When the state is centralized, the ruling class is much more likely to play a dominant role than it is in a decentralized state. The cultural production is more likely to be polished and refined when ruling classes dominate the direction that it takes, and less so when their role is reduced. When the state is decentralized, as it was during the Ottoman period, and the structures at the top are weaker, the cultural forms and patterns from below are more likely to emerge. Therefore, rather than compare this period to those before or after it, we may approach it through the larger framework of its changing social and political structures. In both Mamluk Egypt and Egypt under the rule of Muhammad 'Ali and his descendants (nineteenth century), the state was very centralized and played an active role in financing and shaping culture and in education. Likewise the ruling elites were actively involved in creating cultural models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]