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17 results

The Cambridge World History
  • Volume 5, Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500CE–1500CE
  • Edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
  • Published online:
    05 May 2015
    Print publication:
    09 April 2015
  • Volume 5 of the Cambridge World History series uncovers the cross-cultural exchange and conquest, and the accompanying growth of regional and trans-regional states, religions, and economic systems, during the period 500 to 1500 CE. The volume begins by outlining a series of core issues and processes across the world, including human relations with nature, gender and family, social hierarchies, education, and warfare. Further essays examine maritime and land-based networks of long-distance trade and migration in agricultural and nomadic societies, and the transmission and exchange of cultural forms, scientific knowledge, technologies, and text-based religious systems that accompanied these. The final section surveys the development of centralized regional states and empires in both the eastern and western hemispheres. Together these essays by an international team of leading authors show how processes furthering cultural, commercial, and political integration within and between various regions of the world made this millennium a 'proto-global' era.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History
    Published online:
    05 May 2015
    Print publication:
    09 April 2015, pp 1-40

  • Summary

    This introduction presents an overview of the concepts covered in this book. It sketches the growing knowledge about the world's appearance and the largely civilization-centric works of history that were available during the Middle Millennium. Maps are apt to traverse civilizational boundaries with relative ease. The chapter explores the history of the Middle Millennium as it emerges from present-day research. It discusses cartography, written histories, and regular trans-civilizational relations. Pride of place in the study of the movement toward more intense integration of large-area units, and of communication among them, should go to regular interactions. Of these, the most important were war and conquest that led to the formation of states, the development of trade networks, and the emergence of religious ecumenes. The spread of paper exemplifies the ways in which knowledge and technology spread and how an item could be detached from its original major use as it spread.