Chenxi Tang Libri

The emergence of international law in early modern Europe aimed to regulate relations among newly sovereign states, striving to create a normative order amidst global uncertainties. Despite its intentions, this legal framework was inherently fragile, lacking a recognized common authority to enforce its principles, reflecting the complexities and challenges of state sovereignty during this transformative period.

The Geographic Imagination of Modernity traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in modern Western thought in the decades around 1800. This period represents an extraordinary intellectual threshold, a time when European society invented new conceptual strategies for making sense of itself. Tang's book brings to light, for the first time, geography as one of the most important of these conceptual strategies. Tang's inquiry revolves, first of all, around the rise of geographic science, as it is in this science that the geographic imagination crystallizes. The second part of the book offers a systematic study of the key spatial categories of the modern geographic imagination, including orientation, cultural landscape, and geohistory. In reconstructing the emergence of geographic science and the modern semantics of geographic space, this book approaches the literary and philosophical discourses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from a radically new perspective.