This chapter sets the scene for a reorientation of thinking about the scope of Byzantium and Byzantine Studies for a new generation of scholarship. It charts the changes in the field since the seminal *East of Byzantium* volume of 1982 and argues for the inclusion of the broader Christian East under the umbrella of Byzantine Studies. To what degree is “East Rome” too limiting a concept for the vibrant fields of Eastern Christian Studies that find themselves often adjacent to Byzantium in modern scholarship? At the same time, real connections and disconnections must be explored across political and imperial lines, and the value of Global History is assessed as a tool for understanding the field holistically. The Byzantine Near East is a burgeoning field that brings many new questions and a host of literary, artistic, and material evidence to bear on what “Byzantium” meant in the early Middle Ages.

This chapter addresses how Greater India featured in the Hindu nationalist imagination and B.K. Sarkar’s oeuvre. Disavowing Indian exceptionalism, Greater India became a tool to trace and project the Hindu nation as a historical actor making its mark on the world. Magna India was imagined as a colonial sphere where the vigorous, manly Hindu imposed his national will. The twin objectives of challenging the East-West civilizational dichotomy and ‘restoring the nation to the world’ rested on reclaiming a form of historical agency that had been forgotten or ignored in British accounts. By stressing equivalence with the West and emphasizing the secular and ‘national’ agency of ‘world historical figures’ such as Ashoka and the Buddha, Sarkar sought to puncture the ‘myth’ of Indian civilization as other-worldly and mystical, and argued that ancient India had been a great colonizing, civilizing and secular power on a par with ancient Greece and Rome. Writing India into world history on decidedly Eurocentric terms inspired presentist calls for Young India to compete with the West. Such visions of a ‘Modern Greater India’ were linked to debates about the fate of Indian diaspora communities.

The introduction leverages the insights and interventions of world, global, and transnational histories to bring a rich world of interaction between China and the Philippines in the early twentieth century to life. After overviewing the layered connections that formed the Sino–Philippine link, which is the subject of the book, the introduction turns toward methodological approaches that best expose and explore the depths of those connections. It starts this endeavor by highlighting some limitations of world, global, and transnational history, such as their tendency to be prescriptive rather than responsive, their tendency to privilege actors and institutions from the Global North, and the high cost of entry for new scholars to the field. It argues that, while these limitations are important to recognize, transnational, global, and world histories still have much to offer if they can become more accessible, flexible, and representative. Finally, the introduction outlines the approach of the book, which adopts an interdisciplinary, decolonial, connected approach to world history that pays attention to disintegration as well as creation, implements selective silences, centers cultural and discursive flows between peoples of the Global South, and explores unencumbered articulations of race, modernity, and gender.

The Epilogue discusses the impact of the Mongol Empire on world history, stressing the role of the Mongols’ nomadic culture and its main features: mobility and redistribution. It refers to the devastation caused by the empire – its reasons, scope, and outcome; the Mongols’ active role in promoting cross-cultural, economic, and religious exchanges; and the geopolitical, ethnic, and institutional transformation it instigated in the different realms (notably China, Iran, Russia, and Central Asia). It concludes with the Mongol contribution to the Age of Exploration, the transition from the medieval to the early modern world, and the eventual decline of nomadic political power.

The Cambridge History of the Mongol Empire studies the Mongol Empire from a holistic point of view in its full Eurasian context, putting the Mongols and their nomadic culture at the center. It scrutinizes the Mongol Empire as a multifaceted phenomenon that combined elements from various Asian imperial traditions (steppe, Islamic, Iranian, and Sinitic empires) and created a common imperial culture – political, material, institutional – that has had a broad and enduring impact on world history. The two-volume set comprises a volume about history – political, thematic, regional, and external – and a volume devoted to sources on the empire – literary (in sixteen languages), archaeological, and visual.

The Introduction reviews the raison d’être behind this Cambridge History, its structure, and the state of the field in the study of the Mongol Empire. Finally, it commemorates two contributors, both leading Mongolists, who passed away in 2019, Thomas T. Allsen and David O. Morgan.

World War II is widely understood as the endpoint of the progressive narrative of ’World History’. The conventional critical narrative of Australia’s post-war literature, however, identifies a dominant mythopoeic tendency of quest, often bound up with narratives of colonial discovery and settlement. Through this lens, Australian literature of this period appears to be driven by the outmoded teleologies and linear imperatives that underpinned the obsolete narrative of World History. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, however, the apparent retrogression of Australian literature appears more complex. Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941) provides a blistering critique of the Bildungsroman in the context of colonialism and the failed quests of Patrick White’s eponymous hero in Voss (1957) and of Stephen Heriot in Randolph Stow’s To the Islands (1958), which do not repeat the narrative of European discovery so much as expose and exhaust its operations. Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, published in 1980 but set in the period immediately after World War II, makes this process explicit and provides, inter alia, a framework for reconsidering the Australian post-war novel as a reckoning with World History that links the practices of colonialism with the catastrophe of the war.

Scholars of international political economy (IPE) often locate the origins of their field in the contested nature of the world economy of the early 1970s, but many of its early proponents drew important inspiration from political economists who had an international focus from the pre-1945 period. This chapter summarizes the book’s analysis of the field’s pre-1945 roots, an analysis that challenges conventional depictions of this history in two ways. First, the book embraces a more global conception of the field’s pre-1945 roots by highlighting many contributions made by thinkers from outside Europe and the United States. Second, it shows that discussions of the international dimensions of political economy before 1945 involved much more than a debate between the three perspectives of economic liberalism, neomercantilism, and Marxism. This introductory chapter also highlights some limitations of the analysis as well as some of the motivations behind the project.

Chapter 2 places Hegel’s views on the nature of constitutions in the context of contemporary discussions of what may be termed constitutional transferability, engaging in particular with the French Revolution and the English constitution. It introduces Hegel’s conception of the constitution as an organism, his denial of the possibility of deriving constitutions ‘a priori’, and his simultaneous support for the introduction of written constitutions and legal codification. Hegel’s account of the nature of constitutions is interpreted as supporting a specific kind of constitutionalism while discrediting another. Through a constitutionalist approach to world history, Hegel sought to resolve the inherent tension between universal demands of reason and local particularity, inscribing the progress of world history with freedom and the representative system. By showing that he could draw on prevailing views in doing so, Hegel’s influential attempt to reconcile organic growth with the demands of reason, history with freedom, and community with the individual is lifted out of isolation. His identification of the representative system with subjective freedom, introduced in this chapter, forms a recurring theme throughout the book.

The three subchapters illustrate, how the authors from the Medieval period down to the fifth century have heavily relied on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church history to writing their own beginnings of Christianity. In addition, they drew heavily on pseudonymous material outside the New Testament canon which they largely ignored. Driven by the challenges of their own times and in answering questions of their own days they developed the beginnings of Christianity from Frankish and late Roman perspectives. In these, vernacular, Greek and Roman cultural elements were deeply inter-related and re-projected into earlier times, while Christianity became regarded as the filter through which to perceive and judge the past.

The three subchapters demonstrate the early attempts at Christianizing historiography. The start of history is made by the historically perceived Resurrection of Christ, as outlined by Iulius Africanus. Christians are not simply part of a long history of human development, but they mark a new beginning of human history. What existed before, Paganism and Judaism, were only ephemeral preparations for Christianity. Like Eusebius later, he draws on pseudonymous writings, particularly documents that he refers back to the archive of Edessa. Origen, before him, had already approached history from a spiritual angle, largely disregarding the historical and chronological side of it, and making use of the canonical writings of the New Testament in an allegorical way by which he dissociates Christian history from that of Jews and Pagans, and sees it guided and foreseen by God. Very similar to Origen, Tertullian in the Latin speaking world portraits Christians in fighting of Pagans and Jews, but also deviant Christians, heretics and less commited brothers and sisters which he contrasts with those prophetic Christians who are fully engaged, are prepared for asceticism, rejection of pagan pasts and are willing martyrs. Instead of canonical scriptures it is the prophetic reading of the church traditions that inform about the origins of Christianity.

The Introduction to Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet outlines large themes in the 6,000-year story of how cities gave humans the power to dominate Earth. Our Urban Planet is at once a plural and a singular phenomenon. Its diversity reflects the many birthplaces and birthdates of cities on six continents over six millennia, yet it has become a connected city-enabled habitat of a single species on a single planet. Cities – compact built spaces that rely on many other, dispersed ones – allowed us to harvest enough energy from the Sun and Earth to create the political communities, institutions, wealth, and ideas we needed to act on a global scale, to build an Earth-encrusting habitat, to impact all other parts of our planet’s biosphere, and to face the consequences. The life of Earthopolis exists in space and time. As our urban harvests of natural energy transformed throughout global urban history, from river valleys to the world ocean, and then to hydrocarbon, the geographic extent of our Urban Planet’s four defining realms – of human action, habitat, impact, and consequence – expanded and retreated across Earth. Now our Urban Planet puts us in perilous command of our host planet’s entire halo of life.

Postmodernism came to the fore towards the end of the twentieth century. A key dynamic too was globalization. As the world became smaller, its global scope became more apparent and with it the idea of indigeneity – of being indigenous to some part of it. Following the rise of globalization, in a way, its antithesis became apparent, and this sparked a renewed interest in nationalism.