The Cambridge World History, Volume 5: Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 CE–1500 CE

About this book

Volume 5 of The Cambridge World History series uncovers the cross-cultural exchange and conquest, and the accompanying growth of regional and trans-regional states, religions, and economic systems, during the period 500 to 1500 CE. The volume begins by outlining a series of core issues and processes across the world, including human relations with nature, gender and family, social hierarchies, education, and warfare. Further essays examine maritime and land-based networks of long-distance trade and migration in agricultural and nomadic societies, and the transmission and exchange of cultural forms, scientific knowledge, technologies, and text-based religious systems that accompanied these. The final section surveys the development of centralized regional states and empires in both the eastern and western hemispheres. Together these essays by an international team of leading authors show how processes furthering cultural, commercial, and political integration within and between various regions of the world made this millennium a 'proto-global' era.

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

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Biography

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 University Press, 2013), Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition (Cambridge University Press, 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.


Contributors:
- Benjamin Z. Kedar
- Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
- Joachim Radkau
- Susan Stuard
- Susan Reynolds
- Linda Walton
- Clifford Rogers
- Patrick Geary
- Daud Ali
- Paul S. Atkins
- Michael Cooperson
- Rita Costa Gomes
- Paul Dutton
- Gert Melville
- Claudia Rapp
- Karl-Heinz Spieß
- Stephen West
- Pauline Yu
- Björn Wittrock
- Richard Smith
- Michel Balard
- Himanshu Ray
- Dagmar Schaefer
- Marcus Popplow
- Charles Burnett
- Anatoly Khazanov
- Michael Cook
- Miri Rubin
- Tansen Sen
- Johann Arnason
- Richard von Glahn
- Michal Biran
- Jean-Claude Cheynet
- David Conrad
- Michael E. Smith
- Sabine MacCormack
- Diego Holstein