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Human capital is central to current debates about the sources of growth and divergence in the premodern economy. Apprenticeship, the key formal arrangement by which occupational skills were transferred in this period, has in the past often been associated with guild monopolies and exclusion, implying a drag on the accumulation of human capital. Several stimulating recent contributions have pointed to apprenticeship as a potentially important explanation for English or European advances in manufacturing and technology in the run up to industrialisation. In this paper, we explore mechanisms that helped improve quality among artisans. We focus on one in particular: the selection of training masters by apprentices.

Indigenous knowledge has become a catchphrase in global struggles for environmental justice. Yet indigenous knowledges are often viewed, incorrectly, as pure and primordial cultural artifacts. This collection draws from African and North American cases to argue that the forms of knowledge identified as "indigenous" resulted from strategies to control environmental resources during and after colonial encounters. At times indigenous knowledges represented a "middle ground" of intellectual exchanges between colonizers and colonized; elsewhere, indigenous knowledges were defined through conflic

AbstractIn a rapidly globalizing world, indigenous knowledge is in mortal danger, and it will require new forms of intellectual property protection to save it. There are fundamental incongruities between Western intellectual property law and indigenous knowledge that prevent the current international intellectual property framework from fully comprehending or addressing the contexts and needs of indigenous knowledge. This article will review the history of international and regional initiatives to develop protection for indigenous knowledge. It will consider the geopolitical context that has informed discussions about protecting the intangible wealth of indigenous peoples, including the recent addition of articulate and impassioned indigenous voices to the conversation. Finally, this article will discuss some of the concerns that have been raised about subjecting indigenous knowledge to a system of formal legal regulation.

"At both a micro-information level and a macro-societal level, the concepts of "knowledge" and "wisdom" are complementary - in both decisions and in social structures and institutions. At the decision level, knowledge is concerned with how to make a proper choice of means, where "best" is measured as the efficiency toward achieving an end. Wisdom is concerned with how to make a proper choice of ends that attain "best" values. At a societal level, knowledge is managed through science/technology and innovation. And while science/technology is society's way to create new means with high efficiencies, they reveal nothing about values. Technology can be used for good or for evil, to make the world into a garden or to destroy all life. It is societal wisdom which should influence the choice of proper ends - ends to make the world a garden. How can society make progress in wisdom as well as knowledge? Historically, the disciplines of the physical sciences and biology have provided scientific foundations for societal knowledge But the social science disciplines of sociology, economics, political science have not provided a similar scientific foundation for societal wisdom. To redress this gap, Frederick Betz examines several cases in recent history that display a fundamental paradox between scientific/technological achievement with devastating social effects (i.e., historical events of ideological dictatorships in Russia, Germany, China, and Yugoslavia). He builds a new framework for applying social science perspectives to explain societal histories and social theory. Emerging from this methodological and empirical investigation is a general topological theory of societal dynamics. This theory and methodology can be used to integrate history and social science toward establishing grounded principles of societal wisdom."--Publisher's website

Intro -- Series Editor' Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Notes to the Reader -- The Periodization of Japanese History -- The Tokugawa System -- Names and Romanization -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: The Reproductive Body of the Goseihō School -- Goseihō's Microcosmic Body15 -- Manase Dōsan and the Goseihō School -- Obstetrics and Gynecology Through the Genroku Era28 -- Katsuki Gyūzan and His Work -- Pronatalist Reproductive Techniques -- Disciplining Pregnant Women -- Representing the Birthing Process -- Markers of Sexual Difference -- Chapter 3: Changing Perceptions of the Female Body: The Rise of the Kagawa School of Obstetrics -- The Rise of the School of Ancient Practice -- The Kagawa School of Obstetrics -- Kagawa Gen'etsu -- The Reconceptualization of the Body in Sanron and Sanron Yoku -- A New System of Obstetric Procedures -- Obstetric Practice in Commercialized Society -- The State, Physicians, and Reproductive Surveillance -- Chapter 4: The State, Midwives, Expectant Mothers, and Childbirth Reforms from the Meiji Through to the Early Shōwa Period (1868-1930s) -- The Establishment of New Medical and Public Health Systems -- Changing Power Relations Involving the State, Medical Experts, and Expectant Mothers in Meiji Japan -- Early Meiji Regulations -- The Making of Modern, Nationalist Midwives -- Childbirth Reforms -- Reproductive Surveillance Through Midwives -- Chapter 5: Women's Health Reforms in Japan at the Turn of the Twentieth Century -- Discourse on "Japanese Bodies" and Adopting the Eugenics Thought -- Molding Young Women's Bodies Through Physical Education -- Medicalized Discourse on Women's Clothes and Beauty -- Women's Resistances and Collusions -- Chapter 6: Knowledge, Power, and New Maternal Health Policies (1918-1945).

AbstractIn the mid 1920s Prince Damrong Rajanubhab and George Coedès jointly formulated the stylistic classification of Thailand's antiquities that was employed to reorganize the collection of the Bangkok Museum and has since acquired canonical status. The reorganization of the Bangkok Museum as a 'national' institution in the final years of royal absolutism responded to increasing international interest in the history and ancient art of Southeast Asia, but represented also the culmination of several decades of local antiquarian pursuits. This paper traces the origins of the art history of Thailand to the intellectual and ideological context of the turn of the twentieth century and examines its parallelism to colonial projects of knowledge that postulated a close linkage between race, ancestral territory and nationhood.

The article considers the mechanisms of assimilation of new knowledge in science - scientific communication (in particular, scientific discussion), justification, understanding. Scientific communication gives the results of individual cognitive acts a universal and necessary character. In scientific discussions, arguments are accumu-lated for the scientific community to choose more promising knowledge, and prerequisites for the recognition of new knowledge are formalized. Justification acts as a mechanism for giving knowledge an intersubjective character. As a result of establishing the conformity of new knowledge to those elements of science, the truth of which has already been proved, and checking the new knowledge for compliance with the criteria of truth and methodological regulators, the characteristics of the foundation – the truth and effectiveness of established knowledge, the characteristics of scientificity – are transferred to the new, justifiable knowledge. nderstanding is the mechanism of assimilation, which ensures the harmonization, conformity of new and old knowledge. Representation of the meaning of knowledge objects in content coincides with its introduction into already exist-ing more general scientific systems, for example, in a discipline, branch of knowledge, which ensures the har-monization of new and old knowledge.

"The author, speaking as a Mozambican researcher living and working in Portugal, examines the different types of knowledge about the history of the colonial relationship and the independence movement produced in the two countries. The colonial project entailed the construction of (at least) two divergent narratives on the meanings of the Portuguese presence in Mozambique, narratives that render difficult any possibility of mutual recognition. Colonialism involved much forgetting and silencing; the dominant Eurocentric perspective on colonial history needs to be questioned and problematized. This is not contradictory with a critical questioning of the official post-colonial narrative of the independent Mozambican state, whose nationbuilding
function caused it to silence the diversity of memories generated by the interaction between colonizers and colonized and to justify the repression of those who questioned the official
version of history. Public narratives, official or otherwise, that construct or reconstruct memories
are inevitably in competition with each other and reflect power relations. But the full plurality of memory does not receive public attention; it must be dug out by activist researchers who are able to distinguish subject and object and to produce knowledge in full understanding of the complex relations created by historical legacies." (author's abstract)