Until the nineteenth century the warhorse played a central role in the political organization of the great empires that bordered on the pastoral heartlands of Central Eurasia. Actually, the survival of the often (semi-)nomadic rulers of these frontier-empires hinged on the continued production, trade and use of Central Eurasian warhorses. This forestalled the full sedentarization of these rulers and conditioned the emergence of a post-nomadic political culture and organization in which Central Eurasian institutions like ordo, nökör and yurt continued to provide a forceful paradigm to mobilize, organize and enumerate cavalry armies. But as the specific ecological circumstances created different conditions for the breeding and trade of warhorses, they also gave rise to different interpretations of the nomadic paradigm. This is demonstrated in the case of the Mughal rulers in India and the Manchu-Qing rulers in China, who both shared a common Central Eurasian heritage and ruled the richest sedentary economies of their time.

This essay deals with the hagiographic afterlife of Catarina de San Juan, the seventeenth-century slave from Asia who became a renowned mystic in colonial Mexico, in writings by German Jesuits, notably Joseph Stöcklein’s popular Welt-Bott. Why and how was Catarina de San Juan’s story told for a German-speaking audience in Central Europe? The specific German appropriations of her vita suggest that missionary writings could serve as a transmission belt for ‘colonial fantasies’, linking the early modern period when the Holy Roman Empire did not have colonies to the modern period when the German Nation acquired colonial holdings in the Pacific.

This article explores the past, present, and possible future directions of the ‘‘new thalassology’’ [from the ancient Greek thalassa, ‘‘sea’’] and Indian Ocean studies from its humble beginnings in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cross-fertilization between the ‘Annales’ school and world-systems analysis in the 1980s, to its – admittedly incomplete – institutionalization in the early twenty-first century. In addition, it defines the numerous, often flexible and permeable, spatial and temporal boundaries or ‘frontiers’ of the Indian Ocean world(s). A final section surveys some of the potentialities and pitfalls of Indian Ocean studies and the new thalassology, with the strengths outweighing the weaknesses. The new thalassology undoubtedly presents some daunting challenges. It is to be hoped, however, that charting some of the ‘hundred frontiers’ of the globalized, inter-regional Indian Ocean seascape provides some sense of direction for this exciting field of scholarship and helps shape the future contours of maritime-based studies

The article examines the debate on globalization as a historical process and provides a context for the assessment of western Africa’s long-run contribution to the process, the main subject of the article. It argues that the process began in the Atlantic basin in the sixteenth century; in the nineteenth, it gave rise to an integrated Atlantic economy, the nucleus of the modern global economy. The process involved the transformation of the predominantly subsistence economies of the Atlantic basin in 1450 to market-based economies before their integration by the Atlantic market could occur. Large-scale specialization of the plantation and mining economies of the Americas was central to the transformation process. Because of abundant land, large-scale plantation agriculture in the Americas was made possible by coerced African labour. In the end, the unique characteristics of the export slave trade that supplied coerced African labour to the Americas retarded the development of the market economy in western Africa and kept the region’s economies out of the integrated commodity production processes of the Atlantic economy until that trade ended in the mid-nineteenth century. The analysis of the commercializing process in the Atlantic basin and its causal link to England’s Industrial Revolution, with its new technologies, and to the establishment of the integrated nineteenth-century Atlantic economy presents a powerful argument that places Africa at the centre stage of the globalization process

India played a leading role in the growth of the early modern world economy. Yet its historiography has been dominated by forebodings of the colonial conquest and decline, which were to overtake it at the end of the eighteenth century. This essay seeks to explore the strengths rather than weaknesses of the Indian economy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries when the goods which it produced were in heavy demand in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. However, it also points to ways in which specific features of India’s commercial development created vulnerabilities to conquest from overseas, which would be exploited later on.