This book launch will celebrate and discuss the launch of the new volume, Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World: The Practice and Experience of Movement (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), co-edited by Paul Nelles and Rosa Salzberg.

This book offers a panorama of movement, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world and challenges dominant notions of the ‘fixed,’ immobile nature of pre-modern cultures through study of the inter-connected material, social, and cultural dimensions of mobility. The case studies presented in the book chart the technologies and practices that both facilitated and impeded movement in diverse spheres of social activity such as communication, transport, politics, religion, medicine, and architecture. Collectively, they underscore the importance of the movement of people and objects through space and across distance to the dynamic economic, political, and cultural life of the early modern period.

The book launch will include a roundtable discussion on the history of early modern mobilities, present and future work on this topic, with participation by the editors as well as Simon Ditchfield (York), Paola Molino (Padua), and John Gallagher (Leeds), followed by a Q&A.

Book Launch: Connected Mobilities in the Early Modern World