Books by J. B. (Jack) Owens
Rebelión, monarquía y oligarquía murciana en la época de Carlos V, 1980
J. B. Owens. Rebelión, monarquía y oligarquía murciana en la época de Carlos V. Murcia: Universid... more J. B. Owens. Rebelión, monarquía y oligarquía murciana en la época de Carlos V. Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1980. My sincere thanks goes to Javier Ezcurdia, world-systems sociology graduate student at the University of Binghamton (New York, USA) for preparing this pdf for me. The companion piece for this book is: J. B. Owens. “Los Regidores y Jurados de Murcia, 1500-1650: Una guía.” Anales de la Universidad de Murcia 38,3 (1981): 95 150. I hope to upload a pdf of this publication soon.
Historians and historical social scientists can now learn geographic information systems (GIS) wi... more Historians and historical social scientists can now learn geographic information systems (GIS) with the aid of an introductory training manual designed especially for them.
Update (July 31 2017): Beginning today, you must download MapWindow 4.8.6 directly from our website. To install the software required to do our exercises, kindly access the following URL: http://www.geographicallyintegratedhistory.com/begin-here/
Book/e-book by J. B. Owens
Review of J. B. Owens, 'By My Absolute Royal Authority': Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth a... more Review of J. B. Owens, 'By My Absolute Royal Authority': Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age, written by Rila Mukherjee (U. of Hyderabad, India), in which she does an excellent job of explaining the book and suggesting future research.
""By My Absolute Royal Authority": Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the... more ""By My Absolute Royal Authority": Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age is a study of judicial administration. From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the kingdom of Castile experienced a remarkable proliferation of judicial institutions, which historians have generally seen as part of a metanarrative of "state-building." Yet, Castile's frontiers were extremely porous, and a crown government that could not control the kingdom's borders exhibited neither the ability to obtain information and shape affairs, nor the centrality of court politics that many historians claim in an effort to craft a tidy narrative of this period.
Castilians retained their loyalty to the monarchy not because of the "power" of the institutions of a developing "state," but because they shared an identity as citizens of a commonwealth in which a high value was given to justice as an ultimate purpose of the political community and a conviction that the sovereign possessed "absolute royal authority" to see that justice was done. This expectation served as a foundation for the political identity and loyalty that held together for several centuries the disparate and globally-dispersed domains of the Hispanic Monarchy, but perceptions of how well crown judicial institutions worked were a fundamental determinant of the degree of support a monarch could attract to meet fiscal and military goals.
This book maps part of this unfamiliar terrain through a microhistory of an extended, high profile lawsuit that was carefully watched by generations of Castilian leaders. Justices from the late fifteenth century to the reign of Philip II had difficulty resolving the conflict because the proper exercise of "absolute royal authority" was itself the central legal issue and the dispute pitted against each other members of important groups who demonstrated a tendency to give prominence to different interpretive schemes as they tried to comprehend their world."
http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=6555
Papers by J. B. (Jack) Owens
New Techno-Humanities, 2023
Cite: Owens, J. B. (2023). “A Complex-Systems Landscape: Recognizing What Is Important in World H... more Cite: Owens, J. B. (2023). “A Complex-Systems Landscape: Recognizing What Is Important in World History,” New Techno-Humanities 3 (1): 6-14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techum.2023.05.003 In Special Issue [Open Access], “Digital Humanities and its Application to Global (Economic) History. Economic Development in the West and East,” edited by Manuel Pérez García. ABSTRACT: This article introduces a complex-systems metaphor/model for a world history greater than the sum of its parts. Due to the difficulty of thinking about any event within such a complicated context, we present a visualization to guide researchers’ recognition of the relationships that shape the historical process they study. To support thought, we repurpose a pair of linked visualizations that model gene expression in the morphogenesis of tissues and organs from a fertilized egg. The visual metaphor presents the shaping factors in two ways. First, the historical process encounters, as it moves through the complex-systems landscape, a series of elevations and depressions, which can be identified with significant relations. Second, from below, the metaphor permits the identification of these perturbations, the hills and valleys, with networks connecting the landscape's undulations to developments in specific places and larger geographic areas. These networks also serve to represent the way the complex human system couples with the complex natural systems relevant to the historical process in question. Moreover, the metaphor demands the recognition of hierarchies of instability, on which historians must focus to understand when a level of instability is reduced through some localized development, and when the instability level in places most relevant to the overall human system become so unstable that the system enters a period of phase transition to a new historical system and period. Employing the metaphor in this manner allows historians to defend the importance of their own research by tying it to world historical processes.
Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies: Bulletin, 2008
J. B. Owens. 2008. “A Multi-national, Multi-disciplinary Study of Trade Networks and the Domains ... more J. B. Owens. 2008. “A Multi-national, Multi-disciplinary Study of Trade Networks and the Domains of Iberian Monarchies during the First Global Age, 1400-1800.” Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies: Bulletin 33, 2 (December): 23-30. Report on the funded project DynCoopNet, European Science Foundation, TECT (The Evolution of Cooperation and Trade) Program, 2007-2010; see pages 23 to 30 of this publication.
J. B. Owens 2022. Brief Biography and CV. Because the CV is long, a brief biography is included a... more J. B. Owens 2022. Brief Biography and CV. Because the CV is long, a brief biography is included as an introduction in order to guide a user to the material of interest.
Markets and Exchanges in Pre-Modern and Traditional Societies, 2021
J. B. Owens (2021) Markets in the shadows, trade diasporas, and self-organizing trading/smuggling... more J. B. Owens (2021) Markets in the shadows, trade diasporas, and self-organizing trading/smuggling networks. In J. C. Moreno García (ed), Markets and Exchanges in Pre-Modern and Traditional Societies, 115-154 [Chapter 7]. Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books. ISBN: 9781789256116 | 240p, H9.4 x W6.7, b/w
Abstract:
As part of an innovative comparative history project to develop new social science concepts about markets and exchanges in pre-modern societies, this chapter focuses on merchant-smugglers (mostly those based in Toledo, Kingdom of Castile) in the 1560s CE. Conversos (those with Jewish ancestors) and Italian merchants (from Genoa and Milan) make up the sample group. Because of the overall project’s orientation, the chapter dedicates attention to women’s agency. The chapter includes two maps by Anderson Sidles (Seattle, WA, USA).
Academia.edu, 2021
J. B. Owens (2021) The World History Methodology of David Ringrose’s Final Two Books
Comments pr... more J. B. Owens (2021) The World History Methodology of David Ringrose’s Final Two Books
Comments presented to the zoom Homage Panel for David Ringrose (1938-2020), Association for Spanish and Portuguese Society annual meeting (virtual), Saturday, 24 April 2021 (https://asphs.net/annual-meeting/). His ASPHS obituary, by Pamela Radcliff, which also includes the family’s obituary, is available online (https://asphs.net/home/21622-2/).
Academia Letters, 2021
Owens, J. B. (2021). ‘By my absolute royal authority: Contracts and judicial institutions; Cooper... more Owens, J. B. (2021). ‘By my absolute royal authority: Contracts and judicial institutions; Cooperation and the nonlinear dynamics of the First Global Age, 1400-1800. Academia Letters, Article 586 (March).
What I did not say. In the final manuscript of my 2005 book, *“By My Absolute Royal Authority”: Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age*, I suppressed two themes for which the book remains relevant. I offer this brief paper to point out to scholars in the fields of economic/institutional history and of cooperation studies that the book provides a great deal of information and analysis related directly to their research interests.
ENTREMONS. UPF JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, 2020
We propose a research scheme for a "world history of the world." Our method provides the means of... more We propose a research scheme for a "world history of the world." Our method provides the means of analyzing the networks, on a global scale if desired, that connected places and people in the context of the multiple political, legal and institutional regimes, local cultural environments, and disruptive events through which the connecting social networks passed. We propose the use of the computational advances of the artificial intelligence (AI) age. However, this article presents these advances in an introductory form designed for novices. In particular, we explain how historians can compensate for the lack of information needed to explain self-organization and emergence in the social networks of the planetary complex, nonlinear, human world-system of the First Global Age, 1400-1800. To fill the information lacunae, we propose the use agent-based modeling (ABM), a type of computational artificial intelligence (AI), to simulate needed data, extending what we know from the available sources. We employ Intentionally-Linked Entities (ILE), a revolutionary database management system (DBMS), to model and visualize information about the influences
*Entremons: UPF Journal of World History* [Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona], 2020
We propose a research scheme for a "world history of the world." Our method provides the means of... more We propose a research scheme for a "world history of the world." Our method provides the means of analyzing the networks, on a global scale if desired, that connected places and people in the context of the multiple political, legal and institutional regimes, local cultural environments, and disruptive events through which the connecting social networks passed. We propose the use of the computational advances of the artificial intelligence (AI) age. However, this article presents these advances in an introductory form designed for novices. In particular, we explain how historians can compensate for the lack of information needed to explain self-organization and emergence in the social networks of the planetary complex, nonlinear, human world-system of the First Global Age, 1400-1800. To fill the information lacunae, we propose the use agent-based modeling (ABM), a type of computational artificial intelligence (AI), to simulate needed data, extending what we know from the available sources. We employ Intentionally-Linked Entities (ILE), a revolutionary database management system (DBMS), to model and visualize information about the influences
Newsletter: Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 2019
Abstract
This report describes my search for nonlinear, nonfiction, narrative forms for histories... more Abstract
This report describes my search for nonlinear, nonfiction, narrative forms for histories of the “local” (e.g. Murcia, Spain) within a dynamic, complex, global system, 1400-1800.
Keywords
Narrative, nonlinear, complex systems, Spanish history, William Faulkner, Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, French Nouvelle vague cinema, Patrick Modiano, Raymond Queneau, Igor Stravinsky, Joanne Bruzdowicz, Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, Andre Gunder Frank, world systems, Agent-Based Modeling, Murray Gell-Mann, Artificial Intelligence, National Science Foundation, Convergence Research
Owens and Kantabutra. “Using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate, within the context of the In... more Owens and Kantabutra. “Using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate, within the context of the Intentionally-Linked Entities (ILE) database management system, missing information: To explain self-organization and emergence in world commercial and political networks during the First Global Age, 1400-1800.”
Paper for the session “Social Network Analysis and Multi-Relational Databases on Comparative Studies in China and Europe”; 18th World Economic History Congress, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, July 29-August 3, 2018 [Tues., 31 July, Session A, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm, Room 5: Samberg Conference Center, MIT]
Slides, presentation by J.B. Owens, World Economic History Congress, MIT, USA.
J. B. Owens and V... more Slides, presentation by J.B. Owens, World Economic History Congress, MIT, USA.
J. B. Owens and Vitit Kantabutra, "Using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate, within the context of the Intentionally-Linked Entities (ILE) database management system, missing information: To explain self-organization and emergence in the world's commercial and political networks during the First Global Age, 1400-1800"
ABSTRACT
This article explores struggles over reputation in the Castilian city of Murcia with par... more ABSTRACT
This article explores struggles over reputation in the Castilian city of Murcia with particular attention to the 1620s. It demonstrates that the basis of dissension was political, with politics understood as the competition over scarce resources among wealthy individuals, many of whom held positions in the municipal council.
J. B. Owens (2006) "El largo pleito entre Toledo y el Conde de Belalcázar: La investigación en el... more J. B. Owens (2006) "El largo pleito entre Toledo y el Conde de Belalcázar: La investigación en el Archivo Municipal de Toledo y la aplicación del concepto de 'poderío real absoluto'," Archivo Secreto, 3, pp. 18-28.
Based on information gathered in the provincial capital of Murcia using the technique of “partici... more Based on information gathered in the provincial capital of Murcia using the technique of “participant observation”, the article describes a crucial period in the transformation of the Spanish Communist Party during Spain’s transition from a fascist dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy.
Uploads
Books by J. B. (Jack) Owens
Update (July 31 2017): Beginning today, you must download MapWindow 4.8.6 directly from our website. To install the software required to do our exercises, kindly access the following URL: http://www.geographicallyintegratedhistory.com/begin-here/
Castilians retained their loyalty to the monarchy not because of the "power" of the institutions of a developing "state," but because they shared an identity as citizens of a commonwealth in which a high value was given to justice as an ultimate purpose of the political community and a conviction that the sovereign possessed "absolute royal authority" to see that justice was done. This expectation served as a foundation for the political identity and loyalty that held together for several centuries the disparate and globally-dispersed domains of the Hispanic Monarchy, but perceptions of how well crown judicial institutions worked were a fundamental determinant of the degree of support a monarch could attract to meet fiscal and military goals.
This book maps part of this unfamiliar terrain through a microhistory of an extended, high profile lawsuit that was carefully watched by generations of Castilian leaders. Justices from the late fifteenth century to the reign of Philip II had difficulty resolving the conflict because the proper exercise of "absolute royal authority" was itself the central legal issue and the dispute pitted against each other members of important groups who demonstrated a tendency to give prominence to different interpretive schemes as they tried to comprehend their world."
Papers by J. B. (Jack) Owens
Abstract:
As part of an innovative comparative history project to develop new social science concepts about markets and exchanges in pre-modern societies, this chapter focuses on merchant-smugglers (mostly those based in Toledo, Kingdom of Castile) in the 1560s CE. Conversos (those with Jewish ancestors) and Italian merchants (from Genoa and Milan) make up the sample group. Because of the overall project’s orientation, the chapter dedicates attention to women’s agency. The chapter includes two maps by Anderson Sidles (Seattle, WA, USA).
Comments presented to the zoom Homage Panel for David Ringrose (1938-2020), Association for Spanish and Portuguese Society annual meeting (virtual), Saturday, 24 April 2021 (https://asphs.net/annual-meeting/). His ASPHS obituary, by Pamela Radcliff, which also includes the family’s obituary, is available online (https://asphs.net/home/21622-2/).
What I did not say. In the final manuscript of my 2005 book, *“By My Absolute Royal Authority”: Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age*, I suppressed two themes for which the book remains relevant. I offer this brief paper to point out to scholars in the fields of economic/institutional history and of cooperation studies that the book provides a great deal of information and analysis related directly to their research interests.
This report describes my search for nonlinear, nonfiction, narrative forms for histories of the “local” (e.g. Murcia, Spain) within a dynamic, complex, global system, 1400-1800.
Keywords
Narrative, nonlinear, complex systems, Spanish history, William Faulkner, Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, French Nouvelle vague cinema, Patrick Modiano, Raymond Queneau, Igor Stravinsky, Joanne Bruzdowicz, Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, Andre Gunder Frank, world systems, Agent-Based Modeling, Murray Gell-Mann, Artificial Intelligence, National Science Foundation, Convergence Research
Paper for the session “Social Network Analysis and Multi-Relational Databases on Comparative Studies in China and Europe”; 18th World Economic History Congress, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, July 29-August 3, 2018 [Tues., 31 July, Session A, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm, Room 5: Samberg Conference Center, MIT]
J. B. Owens and Vitit Kantabutra, "Using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate, within the context of the Intentionally-Linked Entities (ILE) database management system, missing information: To explain self-organization and emergence in the world's commercial and political networks during the First Global Age, 1400-1800"
This article explores struggles over reputation in the Castilian city of Murcia with particular attention to the 1620s. It demonstrates that the basis of dissension was political, with politics understood as the competition over scarce resources among wealthy individuals, many of whom held positions in the municipal council.
Update (July 31 2017): Beginning today, you must download MapWindow 4.8.6 directly from our website. To install the software required to do our exercises, kindly access the following URL: http://www.geographicallyintegratedhistory.com/begin-here/
Castilians retained their loyalty to the monarchy not because of the "power" of the institutions of a developing "state," but because they shared an identity as citizens of a commonwealth in which a high value was given to justice as an ultimate purpose of the political community and a conviction that the sovereign possessed "absolute royal authority" to see that justice was done. This expectation served as a foundation for the political identity and loyalty that held together for several centuries the disparate and globally-dispersed domains of the Hispanic Monarchy, but perceptions of how well crown judicial institutions worked were a fundamental determinant of the degree of support a monarch could attract to meet fiscal and military goals.
This book maps part of this unfamiliar terrain through a microhistory of an extended, high profile lawsuit that was carefully watched by generations of Castilian leaders. Justices from the late fifteenth century to the reign of Philip II had difficulty resolving the conflict because the proper exercise of "absolute royal authority" was itself the central legal issue and the dispute pitted against each other members of important groups who demonstrated a tendency to give prominence to different interpretive schemes as they tried to comprehend their world."
Abstract:
As part of an innovative comparative history project to develop new social science concepts about markets and exchanges in pre-modern societies, this chapter focuses on merchant-smugglers (mostly those based in Toledo, Kingdom of Castile) in the 1560s CE. Conversos (those with Jewish ancestors) and Italian merchants (from Genoa and Milan) make up the sample group. Because of the overall project’s orientation, the chapter dedicates attention to women’s agency. The chapter includes two maps by Anderson Sidles (Seattle, WA, USA).
Comments presented to the zoom Homage Panel for David Ringrose (1938-2020), Association for Spanish and Portuguese Society annual meeting (virtual), Saturday, 24 April 2021 (https://asphs.net/annual-meeting/). His ASPHS obituary, by Pamela Radcliff, which also includes the family’s obituary, is available online (https://asphs.net/home/21622-2/).
What I did not say. In the final manuscript of my 2005 book, *“By My Absolute Royal Authority”: Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age*, I suppressed two themes for which the book remains relevant. I offer this brief paper to point out to scholars in the fields of economic/institutional history and of cooperation studies that the book provides a great deal of information and analysis related directly to their research interests.
This report describes my search for nonlinear, nonfiction, narrative forms for histories of the “local” (e.g. Murcia, Spain) within a dynamic, complex, global system, 1400-1800.
Keywords
Narrative, nonlinear, complex systems, Spanish history, William Faulkner, Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, French Nouvelle vague cinema, Patrick Modiano, Raymond Queneau, Igor Stravinsky, Joanne Bruzdowicz, Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Schaeffer, Andre Gunder Frank, world systems, Agent-Based Modeling, Murray Gell-Mann, Artificial Intelligence, National Science Foundation, Convergence Research
Paper for the session “Social Network Analysis and Multi-Relational Databases on Comparative Studies in China and Europe”; 18th World Economic History Congress, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, July 29-August 3, 2018 [Tues., 31 July, Session A, 9:00 am – 12:30 pm, Room 5: Samberg Conference Center, MIT]
J. B. Owens and Vitit Kantabutra, "Using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) to simulate, within the context of the Intentionally-Linked Entities (ILE) database management system, missing information: To explain self-organization and emergence in the world's commercial and political networks during the First Global Age, 1400-1800"
This article explores struggles over reputation in the Castilian city of Murcia with particular attention to the 1620s. It demonstrates that the basis of dissension was political, with politics understood as the competition over scarce resources among wealthy individuals, many of whom held positions in the municipal council.
Because I have noted increased attention to the history of European fascist movements, I thought that there might be some interest in having available in English translation the key documents of the Spanish fascist government under the leadership of Francisco Franco. I claim no great originality or literary quality for this translation, which I prepared for students in my course “Constituting Modern Spain, 1808-1982”. This course was designed as a comparative, world history course in which we studied attempts to create countries on the basis of written constitutions.
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An earlier version of this paper was presented (by Owens) to the SOCNET Networking Workshop, "'The dream which is not fed with dream disappears': Geographically-Integrated History and Dynamics GIS" (Boise, Idaho, USA), 7-8 August 2012.
Keywords: cooperation; mutualism; fuzzy rule-based modeling; shore-based whaling; Orcinus orca; killer whale; Australian history; Twofold Bay (Eden, Australia)
I base this metaphor on a pair of linked visualizations created by theoretical biologist C. H. Waddington (1905-1975) to model the morphogenesis of tissues and organs from a fertilized egg. The first illustration displays the landscape, a surface with hills and valleys through which a ball rolls, representing the process. The second illustration reveals from below that the landscape’s features are the expression of genes, which are linked together by strings.
I use the first illustration to represent a complex, nonlinear, human system in which the various features respond to variables with which the ball (some historical process) interacts as it rolls in time through the space. From below, Waddington’s genes are now system variables, still connected by strings so that perturbations in a variable will be communicated to other variables, altering the landscape and the ball’s path. A few of the variables, called “control variables,” are always near instability, and if one or more of them becomes unstable, the entire system enters a “phase transition” out of which a new human system emerges. To understand the historical processes, we require narrative knowledge, with which, for clarity, the paper will tie the metaphor to historical examples drawn from the First Global Age, 1400-1800. The PowerPoint and reading version of the paper will be uploaded after the session.
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This article introduces a complex-systems metaphor/model for a world history greater than the sum of its parts. Due to the difficulty of thinking about any event within such a complicated context, we present a visualization to guide researchers’ recognition of the relationships that shape the historical process they study. To support thought, we repurpose a pair of linked visualizations that model gene expression in the morphogenesis of tissues and organs from a fertilized egg. The visual metaphor presents the shaping factors in two ways. First, the historical process encounters, as it moves through the complex-systems landscape, a series of elevations and depressions, which can be identified with significant relations. Second, from below, the metaphor permits the identification of these perturbations, the hills and valleys, with networks connecting the landscape's undulations to developments in specific places and larger geographic areas. These networks also serve to represent the way the complex human system couples with the complex natural systems relevant to the historical process in question. Moreover, the metaphor demands the recognition of hierarchies of instability, on which historians must focus to understand when a level of instability is reduced through some localized development, and when the instability level in places most relevant to the overall human system become so unstable that the system enters a period of phase transition to a new historical system and period. Employing the metaphor in this manner allows historians to defend the importance of their own research by tying it to world historical processes.