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  3. Studies in Comparative World History

The books in this series pursue particular themes as they occur in a variety of societies through time. This approach is designed to combine the depth of current social scientific knowledge with the breadth provided by treating many peoples and areas of the world. The volumes draw upon the insights of many disciplines, including economics, anthropology and sociology. They are written to be accessible and interesting to the student as well as the specialist.

  • General Editors: Michael Adas, Rutgers University, New Jersey, Heather Streets Salter, Northeastern University, Boston, Douglas Northrop, University of Michigan
  • Founding Editors: Philip D. Curtin (1922–2009), The Johns Hopkins University

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12 results in Studies in Comparative World History

Assembling the Tropics
  • Science and Medicine in Portugal's Empire, 1450–1700
  • Hugh Cagle
  • Published online:
    23 August 2018
    Print publication:
    06 September 2018
  • From popular fiction to modern biomedicine, the tropics are defined by two essential features: prodigious nature and debilitating illness. That was not always so. In this engaging and imaginative study, Hugh Cagle shows how such a vision was created. Along the way, he challenges conventional accounts of the Scientific Revolution. The history of 'the tropics' is the story of science in Europe's first global empire. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, Portugal established colonies from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia and South America, enabling the earliest comparisons of nature and disease across the tropical world. Assembling the Tropics shows how the proliferation of colonial approaches to medicine and natural history led to the assemblage of 'the tropics' as a single, coherent, and internally consistent global region. This is a story about how places acquire medical meaning, about how nature and disease become objects of scientific inquiry, and about what is at stake when that happens.

Global Gifts
  • The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia
  • Edited by Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, Giorgio Riello
  • Published online:
    14 December 2017
    Print publication:
    28 December 2017
  • This anthology explores the role that art and material goods played in diplomatic relations and political exchanges between Asia, Africa, and Europe in the early modern world. The authors challenge the idea that there was a European primacy in the practice of gift giving through a wide panoramic review of imperial encounters between Europeans (including the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English) and Asian empires (including Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, Sri Lankan, Chinese, and Japanese cases). They examine how those exchanges influenced the global production and circulation of art and material culture, and explore the types of gifts exchanged, the chosen materials, and the manner of their presentation. Global Gifts establishes new parameters for the study of the material and aesthetic culture of Eurasian relations before 1800, exploring the meaning of artistic objects in global diplomacy and the existence of economic and aesthetic values mutually intelligible across cultural boundaries.

Luxury in Global Perspective
  • Objects and Practices, 1600–2000
  • Edited by Karin Hofmeester, Bernd-Stefan Grewe
  • Published online:
    12 January 2017
    Print publication:
    28 November 2016
  • Global history is predicated on connections and exchange: how connections between far-flung people, places, and objects are forged through a variety of exchanges. As world history has matured as a field, its practitioners have found the movement of commodities between peoples, places, and time a fruitful vehicle for research and teaching. Studies of 'bulk' items like salt, spices, coffee, and other globally-traded commodities abound, but few scholars have examined the role of luxury goods from a global perspective. This anthology charts the many different contexts in which luxury objects have been used across the globe, ranging from the social practices linked to these objects to their production, exchange, and consumption, as well as how these practices varied over time and space and how different societies attributed diverse meanings to the same objects. Using luxury goods as a conduit, Luxury in Global Perspective enriches our understanding of global history.

The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia
  • Industrial Production, 1770–2010
  • Ulbe Bosma
  • Published online:
    05 October 2013
    Print publication:
    07 October 2013
  • European markets almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar produced by slave labor until abolitionist campaigns began around 1800. Thereafter, importing Asian sugar and transferring plantation production to Asia became a serious option for the Western world. In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia and refashioned it over time. Although initial attempts by British planters in India failed, the Dutch colonial administration was far more successful in Java, where it introduced in 1830 a system of forced cultivation that tied local peasant production to industrial manufacturing. A century later, India adopted the Java model in combination with farmers' cooperatives rather than employing coercive measures. Cooperatives did not prevent industrial sugar production from exploiting small farmers and cane cutters, however, and Bosma finds that much of modern sugar production in Asia resembles the abuses of labor by the old plantation systems of the Caribbean.

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800
  • 2nd edition
  • John Thornton
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 April 1998
  • This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. African institutions, political events, and economic structures shaped Africa's voluntary involvement in the Atlantic arena before 1680. Africa's economic and military strength gave African elites the capacity to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics of colonization which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers, and he explains why African slaves were placed in roles of central significance. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors, transferring and transforming African culture in the New World.

Strange Parallels
  • Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830
  • Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands
  • Victor Lieberman
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    30 October 2009
  • Blending fine-grained case studies with overarching theory, this book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a Eurasian-wide pattern whereby local isolates cohered to form ever larger, more stable, more complex political and cultural systems. With accelerating force, climatic, commercial, and military stimuli joined to produce patterns of linear-cum-cyclic construction that became remarkably synchronized even between regions that had no contact with one another. Yet this study also distinguishes between two zones of integration, one where indigenous groups remained in control and a second where agency gravitated to external conquest elites. Here, then, is a fundamentally original view of Eurasia during a 1,000-year period that speaks to both historians of individual regions and those interested in global trends.

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex
  • Essays in Atlantic History
  • 2nd edition
  • Philip D. Curtin
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    13 February 1998
  • Over a period of several centuries, Europeans developed an intricate system of plantation agriculture overseas which was quite different from the agricultural system used at home. Though the plantation complex centered on the American tropics, its influence was much wider. Much more than an economic order for the Americas, the plantation complex had an important place in world history. These essays concentrate on the intercontinental impact.

Cross-Cultural Trade in World History
  • Philip D. Curtin
  • Published online:
    15 March 2010
    Print publication:
    25 May 1984
  • A single theme is pursued in this book - the trade between peoples of differing cultures through world history. Extending from the ancient world to the coming of the commercial revolution, Professor Curtin's discussion encompasses a broad and diverse group of trading relationships. Drawing on insights from economic history and anthropology, Professor Curtin has attempted to move beyond a Europe-centred view of history, to one that can help us understand the entire range of societies in the human past. Examples have been chosen that illustrate the greatest variety of trading relationships between cultures. The opening chapters look at Africa, while subsequent chapters treat the ancient world, the Mediterranean trade with China, the Asian trade in the east, and European entry into the trade with maritime Asia, the Armenian trade carriers of the seventeenth century, and the North American fur trade. Wide-ranging in its concern and the fruit of exhaustive research, the book is nevertheless written so as to be accessible and stimulating to the specialist and the student alike.

Strange Parallels
  • Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830
  • Volume 1, Integration on the Mainland
  • Victor Lieberman
  • Published online:
    06 January 2010
    Print publication:
    26 May 2003
  • This ambitious work has two novel goals: to overcome the extreme fragmentation of early Southeast Asian historiography, and to connect Southeast Asian to world history. Combining careful local research with wide-ranging theory Lieberman argues that over a thousand years, each of mainland Southeast Asia's great lowland corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration punctuated by recurrent collapse. These trajectories were synchronized not only between corridors, but most curiously, between the mainland as a whole, much of Europe, and other sectors of Eurasia. He describes in detail the nature of mainland consolidation - which was simultaneously territorial, religious, ethnic, and commercial - and dissects the mix of endogenous and external factors responsible. Here, then, is a fundamentally original analysis not only of Southeast Asia, but of the pre-modern world.

Rethinking World History
  • Essays on Europe, Islam and World History
  • Marshall G. S. Hodgson
  • Edited by Edmund Burke
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    28 May 1993
  • Is the history of the modern world the history of Europe writ large? Or is it possible to situate the history of modernity as a world historical process apart from its origins in Western Europe? In this posthumous collection of essays, Marshall G. S. Hodgson challenges adherents of both Eurocentrism and multiculturalism to rethink the place of Europe in world history. He argues that the line that connects Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance to modern times is an optical illusion, and that a global and Asia-centred history can better locate the European experience in the shared histories of humanity. Hodgson then shifts the historical focus and in a parallel move seeks to locate the history of Islamic civilisation in a world historical framework. In so doing he concludes that there is but one history - global history - and that all partial or privileged accounts must necessarily be resituated in a world historical context. The book also includes an introduction by the editor, Edmund Burke, contextualising Hodgson's work in world history and Islamic history.

Law and Colonial Cultures
  • Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900
  • Lauren Benton
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    03 December 2001
  • Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture - and not just the global economy - serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics and the interrelation of local and indigenous cultural contests and institutional change, the book uses case studies to trace a shift in plural legal orders - from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial and postcolonial world. In the early modern world, the special legal status of cultural and religious others itself became an element of continuity across culturally diverse empires. In the nineteenth century, the state's assertion of a singular legal authority responded to repetitive legal conflicts - not simply to the imposition of Western models of governance. Indigenous subjects across time and in all settings were active in making, changing, and interpreting the law - and, by extension, in shaping the international order.

Networks of Empire
  • Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company
  • Kerry Ward
  • Published online:
    30 July 2009
    Print publication:
    01 December 2008
  • This book argues that the Dutch East India Company empire manifested itself through multiple networks that amalgamated spatially and over time into an imperial web whose sovereignty was effectively created and maintained but always partial and contingent. Networks of Empire proposes that early modern empires were comprised of durable networks of trade, administration, settlement, legality, and migration whose regional circuits and territorially and institutionally based nodes of regulatory power operated not only on land and sea but discursively as well. Rights of sovereignty were granted to the company by the States General in the United Provinces. Company directors in Europe administered the exercise of sovereignty by company servants in its chartered domain. The empire developed in dynamic response to challenges waged by individuals and other sovereign entities operating within the Indian Ocean grid. By closely examining the Dutch East India Company's network of forced migration this book explains how empires are constituted through the creation, management, contestation, devolution and reconstruction of these multiple and intersecting fields of partial sovereignty.