Table of Contents

1. Introduction Benjamin Z. Kedar and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks; Part I. Global Developments: 2. Humans and the environment: tension and co-evolution Joachim Radkau; 3. Women, family, gender, and sexuality Susan Stuard; 4. Society: hierarchy and solidarity Susan Reynolds; 5. Educational institutions Linda Walton; 6. Warfare Clifford Rogers; Part II. Eurasian Commonalities: 7. Courtly cultures: Western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic world, India, China, and Japan Patrick Geary, Daud Ali, Paul S. Atkins, Michael Cooperson, Rita Costa Gomes, Paul Dutton, Gert Melville, Claudia Rapp, Karl-Heinz Spieß, Stephen West and Pauline Yu; 8. The age of trans-regional reorientations: cultural crystallization and transformation in the tenth to thirteenth centuries Björn Wittrock; Part III. Growing Interactions: 9. Trade and commerce across Afro-Eurasia Richard Smith; 10. European and Mediterranean trade networks Michel Balard; 11. Trading partners across the Indian Ocean: the making of maritime communities Himanshu Ray; 12. Technology and innovation within expanding webs of exchange Dagmar Schaefer and Marcus Popplow; 13. The transmission of science and philosophy Charles Burnett; 14. Pastoral nomadic migrations and conquests Anatoly Khazanov; Part IV. Expanding Religious Systems: 15. The centrality of Islamic civilization Michael Cook; 16. Christendom's regional systems Miri Rubin; 17. The spread of Buddhism Tansen Sen; Part V. State Formations: 18. State formation and empire building Johann Arnason; 19. State formation in China from the Sui through the Song dynasties Richard von Glahn; 20. The Mongol empire and inter-civilizational exchange Michal Biran; 21. Byzantium Jean-Claude Cheynet; 22. Early polities of the Western Sudan David Conrad; 23. Mesoamerican state formation in the postclassic period Michael E. Smith; 24. State and religion in the Inca empire Sabine MacCormack; 25. 'Proto-globalization' and 'proto-glocalizations' in the middle millennium Diego Holstein.

Promotional Information

Global history of cross-cultural exchange and conquest, and the accompanying growth of states, religions, knowledge, and economic systems, between 500 and 1500 CE.

About the Author

Benjamin Z. Kedar, Professor Emeritus of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a leading historian of the crusades and the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the founding editor of the journal Crusades. He has employed varieties of the comparative approach in his Merchants in Crisis (1976), Crusade and Mission (1984), and in numerous articles. He has also proposed to use series of aerial photographs of the same area, shot at different points in time, as reliable sources for the history of Palestine/Israel from 1917 onward. Kedar served as president of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and chaired the board of the Israel Antiquities Authority, and is currently vice-president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He is a corresponding member of the Medieval Academy of America and of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Munich). Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She began her scholarly career as a historian of early modern Europe, with a particular focus on women and gender, and remains a leader in that field, serving as the president of three scholarly societies and since 1996 as the Senior Editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal. Since 2000 she has also moved into world and global history, and now serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Global History. She is the author or editor of twenty books and many articles that have appeared in English, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean. These include Early Modern Europe 1450–1789, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2013), Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition (Cambridge, 2008), Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, 2nd edition (2010) and Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd edition (2010). Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, among others.

Reviews

'… the volumes in this series are tremendous resources. College professors or instructors should feel comfortable assigning undergraduate students essays from these volumes as reading materials. A huge amount of work has gone into producing these accurate and informative essays.' Graham Squires, World History Encyclopedia