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  3. The Cambridge World History
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
May 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139194594
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139194594
Subjects:
American History: General Interest, British History: General Interest, Regional and World History: General Interest, History, Regional History after 1500, Global History
Collections:
Cambridge Histories - Global History, Cambridge Histories - British & European History, Cambridge Histories - American History, Cambridge Histories - Asian History, Cambridge Histories - Middle East & African Studies
Series:
The Cambridge World History
Information

Book description

The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of the Cambridge World History series considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of empires in the eastern and western hemispheres, crossroads areas such as the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Caribbean, and sites of competition and conflict, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The second book focuses on patterns of change, examining the expansion of Christianity and Islam, migrations, warfare, and other topics on a global scale, and offering insightful detailed analyses of the Columbian exchange, slavery, silver, trade, entrepreneurs, Asian religions, legal encounters, plantation economies, early industrialism, and the writing of history.

Reviews

'… gives us a view of the state of the art of a venerable field, with valuable surveys of early modern features of world lifeways from the importance of the environment and resources to disease, urbanization, and household structures.'

Jeremy Adelman Source: Journal of World History

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 16 - The Caribbean region: crucible for modern world history
    pp 393-414
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter proposes a linked sequence of vignettes, chosen to highlight some typical early-modern forms of encounter and transition, while suggesting the diversity of responses. It explores how the rise of early-modern silver trade affected technological practices and meanings at different points along the global network. The chapter deals with China to consider transitions in its biggest industry, textiles and the impact of China's own 'cotton revolution', which began around 1300. It contrasts two cases of import substitution, where European technicians learned to imitate Asian technologies that were draining silver from national coffers. Porcelain was reinvented de novo in eighteenth-century Europe, without any direct transfer or even understanding of the Chinese technology. Calico-printing, in contrast, involved a slow infusion of Asian skills, materials and experts into Europe. Finally, the chapter examines how successfully world-history approaches challenge master-narratives of Western exceptionalism, pointing to some troublesome limitations.
  • 17 - Crossroads region: the Mediterranean
    pp 415-444
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter deals with the process of urbanization, growth of cities, rise in the proportion of the population that lived in cities, and reorganization of cities that followed their growth and spread of urban attitudes and values. It looks at the Japanese, Chinese and European models to explain the patterns of urbanization. Urbanization in early modern Japan was essentially stimulated from within the country. The urban revolution of China was made possible by a rising population, which in turn depended on an agricultural revolution. Given the political fragmentation of the continent, polycentrism is obvious in the case of Europe. The rise of cities in the Middle East and India in the early modern period seems to have happened more for political reasons. The colonial city was established to control the region or manage the unequal trade between colony and metropolis. In all regions, some cities were market-oriented, growing for essentially economic reasons, while the capitals in particular, were state-oriented.
  • 18 - Political trajectories compared
    pp 447-489
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Gender is a very old conceptual category, but a relatively new framework for historical analysis. Sexuality is also a relatively new category of historical study, inspired in part by the gay liberation movement that began in the 1970s. This chapter focuses on three topics that each involved both gender and sexuality: migration, intermarriage and the cross-cultural blending that resulted from these; third- and transgenders; and religious transformations. The contacts between cultures before 1400 that changed gender structures had often been carried out through the transmission of ideas and construction of institutions by individuals or small groups of people. Laws regarding intermarriage were usually framed in gender-neutral language by lawmakers. Migration not only brought men and women from different groups together, but also introduced explorers, soldiers, settlers and officials to individuals who were understood in their own societies to be a third or fourth gender.

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