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Jack Goody , Metals, Culture and Capitalism: An Essay on the Origins of the Modern World (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2012). Pages xix+349. £19.99 paperback.
Metals, Culture and Capitalism is the latest in Professor Sir Jack Goody's long and distinguished sequence of publications on topics ranging over a broad field of social anthropology, social and economic, and cultural history. Focusing on issues including kinship organisation, production technology and literacy, the author's approach has been distinguished by a broadly materialist (sometimes termed Marxisant) approach and a keen eye for the underlying connections between areas frequently treated in isolation from each other. In Metals, Culture and Capitalism he turns his attention to 'the role of metals not only in relation to early cultures but to the European Renaissance and to "modernity" in general' (p. xiii).
The chronological and geographical sweeps are both broad. In twelve chapters the author takes us from the Chalcolithic Age (c. 6000-4000 BC) to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. Geographically, the main focus is on Europe, the Mediterranean world and the Near East, but Africa together with South and East Asia all receive some attention together with briefer allusions to the experience of the pre-Columbian America....