The history of Sino-American relations since the eighteenth century has been powerfully influenced by a series of ad hoc, one might say grassroots American actors, often only loosely bound to the United States government. This insight is the central theme running through this introductory chapter which seeks to offer a new window onto Sino-American relations. While these ad hoc relationships had a powerful influence on US-China relations since the earliest interactions between the two countries, World War II marked a turning point as these ad hoc actors were subsumed into a larger state-centered system of engagement.

Chapter 4 continues the theme of the European Mythology of the Indies (II), exploring the intellectual framework employed by Europeans (specifically Spanish, French, and British) to situate native peoples within a European worldview, taking the narrative from the sixteenth century, through the seventeenth century, and into the early eighteenth century. The chapter considers the use of the terms “civilization” and “barbarism” to characterize indigenous peoples, traditions of millennial thought and prophecy among the Franciscan friars, theories of demonology and witchcraft as applied to native inhabitants, and the myth of the so-called pre-Hispanic evangelization of the Americas and the identification of the Christian St. Thomas with the Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl, the myth of indigenous peoples as descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and finally the myth of the noble savage.

The first city networks were as old as the first cities. The mud brick metropolises of the fourth millennium were built to accelerate a burgeoning regional trading system. Settlements were linked, for example, through the alpha city of Uruk. This chapter also explores the later Babylonian and Ur “world systems.” These were effectively knowledge-based global cities at the heart of robust trading networks. With the advent of the city came the first bureaucratic administrators finding advantages in large concentrated forms of living in a hitherto decentralized world. The strange new idea was hardly normal. Cities were labor intensive, dangerous places that exacted high demands on their populations. With their invention came new social hierarchies. The movement of unprecedented global resources through cities required seminal bureaucratic breakthroughs—not least of which cuneiform writing. This increased the power of a privileged few, extracting exorbitant tribute and labor. Cities were in reality systems of concentrated power and global resource management whose walls functioned to keep their populations in, rather than simply to repel invaders.

The Venetian Republic reached its zenith in the dramatic takeover of “a quarter and a half a quarter” of the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. It acquired a network of port cities – the Stato da Mar – that enabled its control over trade routes between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Called the “hinge” of Europe by one historian, Venice spearheaded an economic leap forward on the continent through a mastery of long-distance navigation. This was Italy’s second great urban age, as cities saw resurgences from the dramatic declines into feudalism in late antiquity. Venice was the prototypical world city of the time, competing with Genoa for control of seaborne trade routes. Indeed, the activities in Italian city-states are critical to the scholarly understanding of the European economic revivals in the ninth and eleventh centuries. The city figures centrally in major works by Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Michael McCormick, Henri Pirenne, and Fernand Braudel for fostering seminal forms of intercity relations at crucial times. Its relations with Constantinople, for example, were of equal importance with those of its Italian neighbors.

Rome’s was a politics of all five senses. It was a city of noise, of refuse and bodies in the street, of massive crowds, of massive construction, and a size and opulence not equaled in Europe again for more than a millennium. In maps and inscriptions, Rome was the center of the world. How did Rome become this way? This chapter looks to intercity relations to resolve this puzzle. The Roman Empire was in effect a network of cities in the core–periphery mode – the ultimate “consumer city” supplied by vast hinterlands. Lacking the perfect local environment, Rome imported the commodities – and people – needed to construct an alpha city. The city grew as haphazardly and violently as the Empire itself. The greater the resources of the Empire, the larger the foundation for Rome’s growth. This hit crisis point in the Late Republic, as an increasingly dispossessed agrarian peasantry migrated en-masse to cities alongside inhabitants from across the world. In short, the context for Rome’s growth was a hitherto unparalleled age of globalization in the first and second centuries CE.

This chapter provides a comprehensive narrative of the central role of Stockholm in the evolution of climate change science, one of the most significant scientific specializations relevant for global environmental governance.. With roots in Stockholm-based Svante Arrhenius’ still remarkably precise calculations in the 1890s of the magnitude of the greenhouse effect, the narrative shows how Carl-Gustaf Rossby, after an initial career in the United States, returned to Sweden from where he managed to build and maintain institutions and networks on both sides of the Atlantic in the postwar decades and secure a stable base for a new understanding of the geophysics and chemistry of climate. Swedish climate science, including expertise in glaciology, became recognized as world-leading, with an early and firm institutional foothold being established at Stockholm University. Of global environmental relevance, it produced entrepreneurial science diplomats like Bert Bolin, a climate scientist and founding chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This trust-building combination of institutions, networks, and policies enabled the continued evolution of Stockholm-based innovative platforms for global environmental governance leadership.

This chapter traces how the concept of ethnicity emerged as a depoliticised alternative to nationality. By the end of the nineteenth century, the triumph of nationalism as the hegemonic source of state legitimacy had resulted in the politicisation of the nation concept. This conceptual linkage of ‘nation’ with ‘state’ opened up a terminological vacuum: If nationhood implied statehood, what label should be given to those stateless nations and national minorities that had neither a state of their own nor the political capacity to acquire one? Against this backdrop, the chapter traces how an embryonic concept of ethnicity was articulated to fill in the terminological void. The chapter’s empirical focus is on the early twentieth-century academic literature on nationalism and the establishment of the world’s first international minority rights regime after the First World War. The argument also has significant implications for debates surrounding the conceptual distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism.

Dietterlin’s Architectura prints and the processes he used to form them engaged with sixteenth-century Central Europe’s robust culture of alchemy to transform the architectural image into a context of scientific inquiry. Formal and iconographic analyses of architectural etchings by Dietterlin, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Hans Vredeman de Vries, in conversation with texts by alchemists Agrippa of Nettesheim and Paracelsus, reveal how architectural image-makers used etching’s mercurial, shapeshifting forms and the protean materiality of ornament not only to picture but also to activate alchemical theories and principles of empirical investigation. Dietterlin’s Architectura prints channelled etching’s alchemical dimensions, comparing the material and chemical transformations involved in architectural etching with the processes of transmutation studied in contemporary alchemical research. As is evident from the alchemical imagery that Dietterlin’s Architectura contributed to the court art of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, the Architectura established architectural images as contexts of alchemical thinking in the years around 1600. In sum, the transformative structures of Dietterlin’s architectural etchings allowed architectural prints to become fora for natural philosophical inquiry.

This chapter discusses Ghazali’s Writings in Persian and reception in Iran. Typical Ghazālī studies center his Arabic output. Yet one major work, The Alchemy of Happiness, was written originally in Persian. Ghazālī participated in a Khurasani cultural tradition. Zarrinkoub argues that Ghazālī’s mystical understanding of Islam, against prevailing literalism, influenced Islamicate civilization and culture. Zarrinkoub highlights the contribution of Persian-speaking philosophers, theologians, and scholars to the mystical and theological development of Sunni Islam. Although Iran is conventionally framed as the epicenter of Shi‘ism, Iran only became a majority Shi‘a country with the Safavid Empire in 1501. Through Persian resources we see a cosmopolitan Islam thriving where the Abbasid Empire intersected with multiple cultural revolutions, and where mysticism and established power clashed and reconciled in Ghazālī’s Sufi encounter. Ghazālī’s flight from the madrasa was a flight from orthodoxy in Islamic education, in his renunciation of the educational system. Ghazālī’s Sufism was partly a critique of the dogmatic understanding of Islam common among the ‘ulama.’