Are there any good books on the structural evolution of the baroque to the early romantic guitar out there? Or at least a book comparing the two?

I posted this a week and a half ago in the Thursday feature but probably put it up a bit late in the day, so people were too tired (understandably) to respond. I figured I'd post it again here, in case anyone is interested in thinking through some of this stuff.

Original Post (with some modest alterations): on scaling, infrastructure, agency

I've been thinking a lot about ways of writing history, both in my own work and in the recent works that I've read. While I'd love to have a broader conversation about the (re-)turn to the "material", I'm thinking specifically of some moves that have been made in recent work. One is the inclusion of infrastructure as a narrative centering device that links some of the recent trends in historiography such as environment, material production, cultural milieux, etc. Another, related, is the use of "scaling" or "zooming" as a way of moving the narrative "lens" through richly populated historical worlds (in which, unlike micro history, the "lens" can pan out to encompass wider historical phenomena). A third is the criticism of "agency" as a device which posits humans-vs-humans, instead of against the structuration of larger world-historical processes such as capitalism (I'll bracket a mention of the enduring subfield of the history of capitalism, which has shifted toward financial instruments in the last decade, concurrent with recent global financial crises).

Does this make sense? Let me give an example. Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013) is a series of evocative portraits of the the global cotton market and its material origins on the Mississippi River in the Antebellum period. Johnson argues that it is crucial to look not at the “agency” of slaves but at their experience and consciousness as a whole, and how the world is structured around them; he thus focuses on material processes (production, exchange, consumption) on micro and macro scales and cognitive experience (how the world was structured for masters, slaves, and everyone in between), and insists the material and cognitive are interlinked. In this way, race can be seen in Johnson’s work as a material and cognitive reality that is understood by blacks and whites alike; Johnson brings out historical racial consciousness by exploring, for instance, the ways that certain sounds (dogs barking, horses hooves clopping) or the bounded spaces of the plantation had different meanings for blacks and whites, while also tracing out the bales of slave-picked cotton that entered global markets and fostered increase demand for such commodities. There's more to the book, and I'd love to hear from people who've read it, but I'll stop the example there. I put it forward as an example of a work that uses "scaling," that depicts "infrastructure", and which resists the "agency" thesis. Johnson only acknowledges the last point directly, the rest is embedded in the narrative. Anyone read any works that operate along similar lines?

To make a connection to more widely-read work -- "Scaling" has been aptly shown by work by Sven Beckert ("World Wide Web of Cotton Production"), who shows the effects of the Civil War on world cotton consumption and production markets. Another recent work by Richard White, Railroaded, deploys the element of scaling quite well, though his former work on the Columbia River does too. And its worth mentioning the classic Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon. Indeed, it seems like some work in environmental history has a good grasp on what I've called scaling.

TLDR:

• Does the "scaling" metaphor work for people? Do they see it in different subfields than 19th century US history?

• Is infrastructure an important component that allows these to operate? How are historians addressing issues of "infrastructure" and "environment", in your experience?

• Is "agency" still an analytical category used in your fields? When is it most useful? Less useful?