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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]

North of the equator It has become a truism of historical writing to conceive of Africa in the course of the nineteenth century as becoming increasingly a part of, and a product of, the expansion of Europe, which, beginning in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had integrated ever larger areas of the world into a single economic system. In attempting an overview of the state of the continent on the eve of partition – roughly over the decade of the 1870s – a large number of questions arise from a consideration of this truism. To what extent was Africa already an adjunct of an economic system dominated by Europe? What was the relationship between Africa and this European system – was it one of an equal or an unequal exchange of commodities? To what extent was Africa dependent economically, if not yet politically? What social and ideological changes were beginning to follow from this dependency? Was Africa a fruit ripe for plucking in the 1870s, was there a certain inevitability about the forthcoming imperialist carve-up, or was partition an extraneous historical occurrence forced upon a continent which had within it other options for coping with the future? There are no answers to these questions that are at the same time simple and sensible. Certainly the answers to all such queries will differ, according to the region of Africa which is under scrutiny. Even within particular regions, the situation of individual states, societies or groups of people, their relations with each other and with the outside world (especially with the European capitalist economies) varied greatly. [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]