ARTICLES

Pliny’s Natural History and the Flavian Templum Pacis: Botanical Imperialism in First-Century C.E. Rome
Elizabeth Ann Pollard, 309

The gardens in the first-century C.E. Flavian Templum Pacis are best understood as formal colonial botanical gardens populated with exotic flora of the type catalogued by Pliny in his Natural History. These gardens, along with the spice market (Horrea Piperataria) located next to the Templum Pacis on the Sacred Way in the center of Rome, were monumental statements of imperial power over the world as the Romans knew it. Both the transplantation to and the sacred offering within the Templum Pacis of botanicals that Romans acquired through conquest in the east and long-distance trade with India were ways to assert ideological and economic power within the Indo-Mediterranean network of exchange.

The Planetary Portent of 1524 in China and Europe
David W. Pankenier, 339

In late February and early March of 1524 there occurred in Aquarius-Pisces an impressive massing of all five planets normally visible to the naked eye. This was the densest such gathering in centuries. In both China and the West such phenomena had long loomed large because of their astrological association with world-changing events on the grandest scale. Events in 1524 in China and Europe in response to the phenomenon
provide insight into the widely divergent Chinese and Western responses to such “millennial” events. The following discussion contrasts the astrological background and contemporary impact of this signal event in late Ming China and Reformation Europe.

Muslims and Social Change in the Atlantic Basin
Sean Foley, 377

Many people perceive America’s relationship with Islam and Muslims as a twentieth-century phenomenon. In reality, America’s relationship with Islam predates the creation of the United States and reflects America’s European, African, and Middle Eastern heritage. Islam was also a key component of Atlantic history in both the eastern and western hemispheres as a rival civilization and a vehicle for religious and political reform. This article will discuss the role of Islam at three crucial turning points in Atlantic history: the Protestant Reformation, the emergence of European nation-states, and the rise of notions of universal human rights.

“Notorious and Convicted Mutilators”: Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible
Lynn Zastoupil, 399

This article links two famous individuals from different parts of the world who produced in the same year (1820) similar extracts of the four gospels. It argues that this was the result of globalizing processes that diffused unconventional views of the Bible to three continents and made international celebrities out of heterodox writers. The hitherto unconnected stories of Rammohun Roy and Thomas Jefferson are also used
to shed light on a long, bitter controversy in Britain about the doctrine of the Trinity, a controversy that followed the flow and counterflow of ideas and people between core and periphery fashioned by empire.

BOOK REVIEWS

A. G. Hopkins, ed. Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local
reviewed by Markus Vink, 435

Jack Goody. The Theft of History
reviewed by Richard Reitan, 440

Norman Yoffee and Bradley L. Crowell, eds. Excavating Asian History: Interdisciplinary Studies
in Archaeology and History
reviewed by Li Feng, 442

Serhii Plokhy. The Origins of the Slavic Nations: Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus
reviewed by Robert H. Greene, 451

Leor Halevi. Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society
reviewed by Christine D. Baker, 453

Mikael Adolphson, Edward Kamens, and Stacie Matsumoto, eds. Heian Japan: Centers and Peripheries
reviewed by Patti Kameya, 456

Alison Games. The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660
reviewed by Michele M. Strong, 459

A. Dirk Moses, ed. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History
reviewed by Robert Melson, 463

Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds. Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800
reviewed by Timothy J. Coates, 466

Paul D. McLean. The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence
reviewed by Edward Tabri, 469

Mathias Schulze, James M. Skidmore, David G. John, Grit Liebscher, and Sebastian Siebel-Achenbach, eds.
German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss
reviewed by Renate Bridenthal, 472

Geoffrey Blainey. A Short History of the 20th Century
reviewed by Grace J. Chae, 475

Vaclav Smil. Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences
reviewed by Suzanne Moon, 478

Sarah Badcock. Politics and the People in Revolutionary Russia: A Provincial History
reviewed by Joshua Sanborn, 481

Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, eds. A Companion to Contemporary Britain: 1939–2000
reviewed by David Simonelli, 484

Michael Makovsky. Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft
reviewed by Sonja P. Wentling, 486

ARTICLES

Islam at the Center: Technological Complexes and the Roots of Modernity
Edmund Burke III, 165

For prehistorians, the concept of the “Neolithic toolkit” provides a means of evaluating the technological capacities of world societies on a cross-cultural basis. This article seeks to refine the toolkit idea by distinguishing a series of the technological complexes that, while originating in different regional contexts, became standardized over the centuries in the lands of Islam in the era before 1500 C.E. and subsequently diffused to the rest of the world. The article focuses on three case studies—the water management toolkit, the writing and information management toolkit, and the mathematics and cosmology toolkit—in an effort to explore the reasons for the apparent centrality of Islamicate societies in the assembling of these technological complexes.

Plants and Progress: Rethinking the Islamic Agricultural Revolution
Michael Decker, 187

Since it was first proposed in the 1970s, the concept of an Islamic agricultural revolution, in which new plants and techniques spread rapidly from east to west and transformed agriculture in the Mediterranean basin, has gained widespread acceptance. Based on an investigation of a sample of plants, the present article argues that changes in farming attributed to the era of classical Islam were far more complex and distended than previously acknowledged. This casts doubt on the validity of the theory of a medieval “green revolution” and calls for a reexamination of its fundamental tenets.

The End of a Silver Era: The Consequences of the Breakdown of the Spanish Peso Standard in China and the United States, 1780s–1850s
Alejandra Irigoin, 207

The breakdown of the monopoly of coinage in Spanish America by the 1820s meant the cessation of the silver standard that had fueled the expansion of global trade in the early modern period. This article analyzes the resulting economic effects in China and the United States. The analysis connects monetary developments in Spanish America with demand-side explanations within China and the increasingly dominant role of North Americans as intermediaries of the world’s silver trade after the 1780s. The article challenges established notions that silver outflow from opium imports or silver shortages from falling South American output were the main causes of economic troubles in nineteenth-century China. Through a comparison with the workings of North American institutions in managing domestic monetary effects, the article highlights the puzzling lack of any monopolistic monetary authority in imperial China.

The “Pursuits of the Civilized Man”: Race and the Meaning of Civilization in the United States and Australia, 1790s–1850s
Gregory D. Smithers, 245

This article undertakes a comparative analysis of settler colonial definitions of civilization in the expanding frontiers of the United States’ “New South” and in southeastern Australia between the 1790s and the 1850s. The article notes that the United States is often omitted from comparisons of nineteenth-century settler societies, an omission that elides the social, cultural, and political similarities that the United States’ republican form of settler civilization shared with settler colonial societies such as New South Wales in Australia. Specifically, the article assesses the important role that ideals of gender, sexual behavior, and racial formation had on evolving understandings of settler civilization in relation to the Cherokee in the United States and among Aboriginal tribes such as the Awabakal and Wiradjur in Australia. The evidence suggests that while white Americans and Australians shared a similar understanding of the gendered ideals required for the highest form of settler colonial civilization to develop on colonial frontiers, these ideals were malleable enough to help travel writers, settlers, and missionaries identify very different racial “problems” that need reforming if settler civilization was to flourish. Woven through this analysis are the responses of Cherokee Indians and Australian Aborigines to settler civilization—responses that reflect both the hegemony of settler colonial power and its contested nature in different settler colonial contexts.

BOOK REVIEWS

Nayan Chanda. Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization
reviewed by Ewa K. Bacon, 273

Peter N. Stearns. Childhood in World History
reviewed by Tanya S. Maus, 276

Barbara Watson Andaya. The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia
reviewed by Barbara N. Ramusack, 279

Paul Spickard. Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity
reviewed by K. Scott Wong, 282

Elliott R. Barkan, Hasia Diner, and Alan M. Kraut, eds. From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Era
Bruce S. Elliott, David A. Gerber, and Suzanne M. Sinke, eds. Letters across Borders: The Epistolary Practices of International Migrants
reviewed by Gary M. McDonogh, 284

Ussama Makdisi. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East
reviewed by Erik Eliav Freas, 289

Sarah Stockwell, ed. The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives
reviewed by Katherine Foxhall, 293

George Steinmetz. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa
reviewed by Daniel Walther, 296

Josephine Fowler. Japanese and Chinese Immigrant Activists: Organizing in American and International Communist Movements, 1919–1933
reviewed by Bryan D. Palmer, 299

Jeffrey Lesser. A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980
reviewed by Kristine Dennehy, 302

Walter L. Adamson. Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe
reviewed by Minsoo Kang, 304

William J. Hausman, Peter Hertner, and Mira Wilkins. Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007
reviewed by Andre Millard, 306

ARTICLES

Frontier Discourse and China’s Maritime Frontier: China’s Frontiers and the Encounter with the Sea through Early Imperial History
Hugh R. Clark, 1

This article provides a model for the analysis of China’s land and maritime frontiers through early imperial history (through the first millennium C.E.), arguing that three basic types of frontier existed: the “static continental frontier,” the “expanding continental frontier,” and the “maritime frontier.” Through his definition of “frontier” and a comparative discussion of the dynamics of all three frontier types, and with reference to the better known analyses of frontiers in the histories of Europe and North America, the author approaches all frontiers as zones of conflict between civilization and barbarism.

The Chinos in New Spain: A Corrective Lens for a Distorted Image
Edward R. Slack Jr., 35

The study of Asian migration to colonial Mexico via the Manila galleons has been languishing in academic oblivion. By exploring contemporary archival and visual records of the chino, this article reveals the ambiguous status of Asians in a race-based caste system imposed by Castilians on the inhabitants of New Spain. It also probes the reasons behind widespread social amnesia in the mid to late eighteenth century with respect to Mexico’s Asian heritage. Furthermore, this article contests accepted scholarly definitions of mestizaje that emphasize a purely Atlantic pedigree. Reconstructing colonial Mexico’s chino identity is imperative for “reorienting” its social history and chronologically repositioning studies on Asian diasporas in the Americas.

Overlapping Histories: Writing Prison and Penal Practices in Late Imperial and Early Republican China
Michael Tsin, 69

It has often been said that the Chinese prison and penal reform in the early twentieth century was part of a global circulation of Western institutions and practices and signified China’s entry into the modern era. The process has also been described as an example of how the local (China) interacted with the global (the West). By moving back in time to locate some fragments of the histories of penal practices and their representation from earlier periods, the objective of this article is to trace the trajectory in which the histories of prison and penal practices became intertwined with the politics of European expansion, and to suggest that the “modernity” of the reform was as much about the reframing of the multifarious histories of the past as a new history of difference as it was about the adoption of Western institutions and practices. In doing
so, it also seeks to demonstrate how the global and the local can best be conceptualized as historical temporalities rather than specific locales.

Coloring Universal History: Robert Benjamin Lewis’s Light and Truth (1843) and William Wells Brown’s The Black Man (1863)
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, 99

The idea of universal history is conventionally associated with nineteenth-century writers and the project of imperialism. This article presents an expanded definition of universal history, one that covers unified histories of the known world or universe, histories that aim to illuminate universal principles, histories of the world unified by the workings of a single mind, and histories of the world that have passed down through unbroken lines of transmission. Encompassed in the broader range of this definition are works by authors who are conventionally seen as marginalized by nineteenth-century historiography. Using the works of two African American authors—Robert Benjamin Lewis and William Wells Brown—as a case study, this article highlights the complexities and cross currents of universal history writing by those on the margins, and the importance of voluntary associations in the production and circulation of their texts.

Atlantic Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century Colombia: Spanish America’s Challenge to the Contours of Atlantic History
James E. Sanders, 131

This article argues that the Age of Revolution and the abolition of slavery do not
adequately mark the termination of the Atlantic world’s political processes, at least concerning Latin America. Employing archival evidence from Colombia as a case study (as well as evidence from Mexico and Uruguay), the article explores how during the nineteenth century in Spain’s former colonies, subalterns, especially popular liberals, and elites debated the meanings of nation, citizen, and democracy. These struggles over visions of republicanism and democracy that racked the region throughout most of the nineteenth century cannot be understood outside of an Atlantic context, nor can the full history of the Atlantic Age of Revolution be complete without taking into account the democratic and republican developments of mid nineteenth-century Spanish America.

BOOK REVIEWS

Carter Vaughn Findley. The Turks in World History
reviewed by Matthew Gordon, 151

Marc S. Abramson. Ethnic Identity in Tang China
reviewed by Paul Fischer, 153

Ann Jannetta. The Vaccinators: Smallpox, Medical Knowledge, and the ‘Opening’ of Japan
reviewed by Angela Schottenhammer, 156

João Resende-Santos. Neorealism, States, and the Modern Mass Army
reviewed by Andrew J. Kirkendall, 158

Martin Shipway. Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires
reviewed by Charles C. Kolb, 160

The Journal of World History passes two milestones this year: starting its 20th year of publishing and making its debut in the JSTOR online archive.

Every published volume of the Journal of World History is now available online. Current volumes will continue to appear on Project MUSE (subscription required), which also contains archives going back to vol. 7 (1996). This month, vols. 1 (1990) through 16 (2005) made their digital debut in JSTOR (subscription required). The JSTOR moving wall is 3 years. In other words, newer volumes will be added to the JSTOR archive 3 years after they first appear in print.

ARTICLES

Truthfulness at Dawn, Truthfulness at Night: Reflections on a Common Striving in Chinese and Jewish Traditions
Vera Schwarcz, 403-430

This article focuses on the commitment to truth seeking in two disparate cultural traditions. Striving for truth is not exclusive to Chinese and Jewish peoples. It is also amply evident in the writings of intellectuals who survived dogmatism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It fuels the passions and the trauma of the “Truth Commissions” that have proliferated from South Africa to Guatemala, East Timor, and Morocco. By exploring specific historical moments and linguistic expression for conveying the quest for authenticity in Chinese and Hebrew, this work draws attention to a broader historical phenomenon: Confucian sages and Jewish prophets who argued for truthfulness in times filled with deceit and injustice bequeathed posterity a vocabulary and a vision that endures today. Historians reckoning with that language and vision need to cast the net of their reflections beyond one culture, one thinker, one moment in time. Laying disparate traditions alongside one another, the author argues, illuminates the central theme of truthfulness in a more compelling fashion.

Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora
Pier M. Larson, 431-464

Since its inception as a concept in the late 1960s, the African diaspora has channeled scholarly interest primarily toward African migrations beyond sub-Saharan Africa. This article outlines a method for the study of African diasporas within sub-Saharan Africa through a focus on consciousness of placement and displacement as emerging in African narratives of enslavement. The consciousness of original placement and of estrangement from home spun by African captives within sub-Saharan Africa challenges scholars of the African diaspora to position the African continent at the center of a global dispersion, as both a source of captives and a location of exile.

The Intricacies of Accommodation: The Proselytizing Strategy of Matteo Ricci
Yu Liu, 465-487

Matteo Ricci has long been celebrated as one of the greatest mediators between Europe and East Asia. To see his extraordinary experience in China from a different perspective, this article takes a close look at the many intricacies that either led to or resulted from his reliance on accommodation as an evangelizing policy. These intricacies made him both remarkably successful in what he did not necessarily plan to do and noticeably unsuccessful in what he single-mindedly set out to accomplish.

Beyond East and West: Antiquarianism, Evidential Learning, and Global Trends in Historical Study
Q. Edward Wang, 489-519

From a comparative perspective, this article examines the rise of “evidential learning” in Qing China of the eighteenth century and its far-reaching influence in shaping intellectual development in modern China. It argues that parallel to the interest of humanists and antiquarians in early modern Europe, the Chinese evidential scholars of the late imperial period pursued a similarly revivalist interest in their study of Confucianism. By improving and perfecting the skills and techniques of textual and historical criticism, and by using the methods of philology, phonology, paleography, and etymology, they hoped to restore the Confucian classics to their earlier, hence (to them) truer and more authentic form. And in pursuing this common interest, these scholars formed an active scholarly community, a Republic of Letters, wherein they exchanged ideas and criticized one another’s works, much as did their European counterparts in advancing humanist and antiquarian scholarship. In reconstructing the historical context whence the Confucian classics had emerged, they also prized the importance of historical and epigraphic study and approached the understanding of the classics from a historical perspective. All this has left an enduring imprint on the endeavor by modern Chinese historians to modernize historical study since the early twentieth century. The legacy of evidential learning demonstrates that the antecedents that were often considered unique in shaping the modern historical discipline in Europe also existed in East Asia and, very likely, elsewhere in the world as well. It is time for us to go beyond the East-West binary to analyze and appreciate the interest in history—and the varied methodologies it has engendered sustaining its pursuit—as a global phenomenon.

The Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya, Islamic Sainthood, and Religion in Modern Times
Sean Foley, 521-545

This article discusses Shaykh Khalid Naqshbandi (1776–1827); his Sufi brotherhood, the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya; and Muslim sainthood. It argues that social movement theory allows us to see the ongoing influence of sainthood in Muslim societies and that Khalid’s success rested on his ideological fl exibility, appeal to multiple audiences, and emphasis on the hereafter. The article also observes that the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya has addressed a desire in modern societies for a greater balance between spirituality and materialism. Finally, the similarities between the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya, a Muslim organization, and contemporary Christian organizations raise questions about how we classify postmodern religious movements and track their development over time.

BOOK REVIEWS

Alfred W. Crosby. Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy
reviewed by Dan Tamir, 547-549

Ian Tattersall. The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE
reviewed by Herbert F. Ziegler, 549-552

Arun Bala. The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science
reviewed by Nurdeng Deuraseh, 552-556

Frank Dikötter and Ian Brown, eds. Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia, and Latin America
reviewed by John R. Pincince, 556-558

Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds. Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s
reviewed by daniel gorman, 559-561

INDEX TO VOLUME 19

563

SPECIAL ISSUE: NEW HISTORIES OF THE UNITED NATIONS

ARTICLES

New Histories of the United Nations
Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, p. 251

The United Nations has become the object of new and exciting historical research because of historians’ renewed interest in themes that have preoccupied the UN from the outset, including questions of race and racism, the global implications of anticolonial nationalism, the problem of development in relations between North and South, and the gendered nature of the postwar international order. In this article we survey the state of histories of the UN and reflect on some of the ways in which the history of the UN has a place in international as well as world history as a site of cultural contestation, influence, continuity, and change.

From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran, 1968
Roland Burke, p. 275

This article examines the first International Conference on Human Rights, held in Tehran in April and May 1968. At Tehran, a powerful bloc of Asian, African, and Arab states successfully asserted their control over the UN’s Human Rights Program. Their aggressive conference diplomacy was the culmination of a major transition in UN politics, with supposedly Western notions of individual freedom rejected in favor of an agenda that privileged economic modernization and the rights of peoples and nations. Twenty years after the iconic image of Eleanor Roosevelt holding the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, the residual elements of the program she presided over were repudiated in a storm of insistent demands from the new anticolonial order.

International Conscience, the Cold War, and Apartheid: The NAACP’s Alliance with the Reverend Michael Scott for South West Africa’s Liberation, 1946–1951
Carol Anderson, p. 297

After World War II, South Africa, swimming against the tide of history, attempted to annex the adjacent international mandate of South West Africa (present-day Namibia). Pretoria was confident of UN approval for such an unprecedented move—too confident, as it turned out. Into the reach—and into the United Nations—stepped an unlikely duo, the Reverend Michael Scott and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to stop the absorption of 350,000
Africans into a white-supremacist state. This seemingly odd couple—a maverick, communist-leaning Anglican minister and a staid, staunchly anti-communist bureaucratic organization—launched a skillful assault in the UN to strip the veneer of legitimacy away from South Africa’s annexationist scheme. Within the span of five years, the NAACP and Scott had carved out the political space and established the right of nongovernmental organizations and individual spokesmen to penetrate the boundaries of national sovereignty, speak before an international audience, and in the process
reshape the UN, despite its founders’ intentions, into an arena that could incorporate the voices of the stateless and the dispossessed.

Population, Geopolitics, and International Organizations in the Mid Twentieth Century
Alison Bashford, p. 327

In assessing population as an intergovernmental and world issue, historians have generally focused on the politics of sex, gender, and reproduction. To expect the history of population to be solely or even primarily about reproduction and individual health, however, is to miss entirely other lines of thought within which population, and in particular world population, came to be a problem for international organizations of the twentieth century. The problematization of population often raised questions about and plans for migration, colonial expansion of territory, and the properties of land and soil—in other words, geopolitics. This article shows how the population problem was precisely a geopolitical problem for the late League of Nations and the early United Nations. The article discusses two institutional occasions on which population as a spatial and security problem came onto the agenda of international organizations. The first case involved a series of meetings held by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, resulting in the document Peaceful Change (1937). The second case arose in the early years of UNESCO when Julian Huxley and others attempted to raise population as a major world issue.

Relocating East and West: UNESCO’s Major Project on the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values
Laura Wong, p. 349

From 1957 to 1966, UNESCO engaged in a decade-long project aimed at improving cultural relations, a project that generated transnational discourse over representations of East and West. The international climate of this period was characterized not only by decolonization and Cold War tensions but also by activism that amplified diverse and increasingly strong Asian and Arab voices in intergovernmental fora. Composing nearly half of UNESCO’s membership by the mid 1950s, these states’ demands for greater agency in the international sphere garnered considerable attention following the Bandung Conference (1955), which rekindled longstanding fears of imminent if not perpetual East-West conflict and also precipitated the call for UNESCO to facilitate interchange around Eastern and Western cultural values. By examining UNESCO textbook exchanges, this article illustrates the regionally distinct representations of Asia and Europe that emerged in the postcolonial context. It reflects regional sensitivities as well as cooperative and sometimes startlingly optimistic positions, which are viewed from a perspective that prioritizes cultural relations as a distinctive framework of transnational analysis informed yet not determined by Cold War paradigms. Through this exploration of intergovernmental efforts to engage states in dialogue on cultural identities in the midst of redefinition and rising ambiguity about the meaning of East and West, this work contributes to a growing body of research on international cultural relations in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Archives of Universal History
Emma Rothschild, p. 375

This article looks at early proposals for an international archive, at the different respects in which archives are international or transnational, and at the development since 1946 of the archives of international organizations. It suggests that the history of the UN’s involvement with archives is itself a development of historical and even political interest.

ARTICLES

“The Salt in a Merchant’s Letter”: The Culture of Julfan Correspondence in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean
Sebouh Aslanian, 127

This article draws on archival sources in London, Venice, Isfahan, and elsewhere in examining the role of information and commercial correspondence in the long-distance trading community of Armenian merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan. The article focuses on commercial letters written by Julfan merchants working in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean regions. It argues that information sharing was important not only for the daily commercial affairs of merchants but also for maintaining the integrity of the Julfan trade network. The article examines the stylistic properties of Julfan mercantile correspondence as well as the logistical problems of circulating letters across vast spaces through a courier network that glued the trade settlements of the Julfan network to its nodal center at New Julfa, Isfahan.

The Countermodern Moment: A World-Historical Perspective on the Thought of Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, and Liang Shuming
Adam K. Webb, 189

In the early twentieth century, traditionally minded intellectuals in Asia offered strikingly similar responses to modernity. This article examines the countermodern visions of Rabindranath Tagore, Muhammad Iqbal, and Liang Shuming. Inspired by high-culture versions of Hinduism, Islam, and Confucianism, these three thinkers offered parallel critiques of materialism and the decline of self-cultivation. At the same time, they brought issues of civilizational identity and universalism to the fore. While their cosmopolitanism never reached the point of making common cause politically, their
intellectual legacy has enduring relevance for the global culture clash between modernity and its critics.

The Russian Empire and Egypt, 1900–1915: A Case of Public Diplomacy
Paul du Quenoy, 213

Russia’s relationship with Egypt developed as both lands underwent prolonged periods of modernization. Constrained by geopolitical factors in the Middle East, Russia approached Egypt in the late nineteenth century and especially in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century with “soft power.” This approach included mutually beneficial trade relationships, cultural exchanges, and international assistance in the realm of information and technology. A close examination of the Russo-Egyptian relationship reveals that the Russian Empire was furthering its ends in the Middle East by peaceful means intended to impress the region’s societies favorably, a concept sometimes characterized today as “public diplomacy.”

BOOK REVIEWS

Kenneth F. Kiple. A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization
reviewed by Coll Thrush, 235

Colin Kidd. The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000
reviewed by Edward E. Andrews, 237

Ambrosio Bembo. Clara Bargellini, trans. Anthony Welch, ed. The Travels and Journal of Ambrosio Bembo Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800
reviewed by Ines G. Županov, 240

Bouda Etemad. Andrene Everson, trans. Possessing the World: Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the 18th to the 20th Century
reviewed by Daniel R. Headrick, 247

ARTICLES

Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China
Siep Stuurman, 1-40

This article presents a comparative investigation of Herodotus and Sima Qian with a focus on their ethnographies of nomadic peoples. Both historians included geography and ethnography in their works because their societies had reached a stage when it was no longer possible to write their histories without taking the measure of their wider environment. The author posits that frontiers are not just locations of “othering” but also zones of creative interaction and regions in which it is possible to take the first steps toward an appraisal of the rationality of foreign cultures. Herodotus and Sima Qian combined an incipient cultural relativism with notions of common humanity, resulting in an anthropological turn, the representation of the cultures of “others” as autonomous systems that must be judged on their own terms. Their anthropological turn is connected to their conceptions of empire and the temporalities underpinning their histories.

When Greek Was an African Language: The Role of Greek Culture in Ancient and Medieval Nubia
Stanley M. Burstein, 41-61

The Nubian encounter with Greek language began in the third century B.C.E. and lasted until the fifteenth century C.E. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Nubian interest in Greek was pragmatic, since the Greek language was used primarily as a diplomatic tool for dealing with Greco-Roman Egypt. During the Middle Ages, however, Greek became integral to Nubian culture as the language of government and Nubian Christianity. This article traces the history of Greek language in Nubia and analyzes its changing function in ancient and medieval Nubian culture.

“Pygmies” of the Far North
Kirsten A. Seaver, 63-87

A recurring issue in discussions about the medieval Norse in Greenland is the name Skræling(j)ar (Skrælings) for the natives whom the eleventh-century Norse encountered
in North America. Grappling with this problem involves confronting the nineteenth-century assumption that medieval people believed in a fl at world. The fact that medieval people, including the Norse, took for granted a spherical world, on whose unexplored fringes lived the monster races described in the medieval Christian canon, is the key both to understanding how the Norse saw their North American experiences and to the interpretation of oddities in several medieval and early Renaissance texts
and maps.

Caught in the Storm of Progress: Timoteos Saprichian, Ethiopia, and the Modernity of Christianity
James de Lorenzi, 89-114

This article examines how European concepts of progress and race transformed relations between non-European Christians in the nineteenth century. The travel narrative of Timoteos Saprichian, an Armenian visitor to Ethiopia from the Ottoman Empire, suggests that some Orthodox Christians set themselves apart from their African coreligionists by using new ideas about the hierarchy of human communities to reorder the Christian ecumene. The article concludes by using Walter Benjamin’s model of progress to understand changes in religious identity during the imperial age.

BOOK REVIEWS

Thomas T. Allsen. The Royal Hunt in Eurasion History
reviewed by Charles V. Reed, 115

Harvey Amani Whitfield. Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860
reviewed by Douglas M. Haynes, 117

Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin, eds. The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness
reviewed by David Wetzel, 119

Mansel G. Blackford. Pathways to the Present: U.S. Development and Its Consequences in the Pacific
reviewed by James P. Kraft, 121

John Gillingham. European Integration 1950–2003: Superstate or New Market Economy?
reviewed by Jeffrey Sommers, 123

ARTICLES

Weaving the Rainbow: Visions of Color in World History
Robert Finlay
pp. 383-431
Abstract: In considering both color vision and color values, this essay brings together natural history and human history. After describing the character and evolution of color vision, it examines positive and negative attitudes toward color in leading cultures of Eurasia. It goes on to discuss color perspectives in those cultures, an examination that discloses a Eurasian pattern: while rejecting color in significant respects, Japan also developed a sophisticated perception of it; China periodically followed the West Asian lead on color; and West Asia represented the radiant center of the Eurasian spectrum. Rejecting West Asia’s high valuation of color, classical Greece and Rome thereby established a European tradition that eventually was overwhelmed during the early modern period as a consequence of pigments and colorful commodities being imported from around the world. This foreshadowed the modern experience of rich color, a consequence of science and technology making universally available an extraordinary array of saturated hues. Such access to color distinguishes the contemporary world from all past societies.

Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World
Anne E. C. McCants
pp. 433-462
Abstract: Evidence that privileges processes of consumption over those of production is critical to a reevaluation of nineteenth-century global integration and European economic growth. The growing body of documentation provided by early modern household inventory studies, along with new research on the contours of European demand for both imported manufactures and locally produced imitations, suggests that the time is now ripe for just such a reevaluation. Particularly, the consumption of tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, porcelain, and silk and cotton textiles increased dramatically in western Europe beginning in the closing decades of the seventeenth century. Use of the new commodities spread rapidly, both in geographical and social space. A variety of household inventory studies from the Netherlands and England are used to document the presence of many of these so-called luxury goods by the working poor by the middle of the eighteenth century. European demand for these goods was fueled not only by the rich with their growing surplus incomes but also by the much more numerous lower and middling classes.

FORUM: DEBATING THE WORLD HISTORY PROJECT

World History as Ecumenical History?
Dominic Sachsenmaier
pp. 465-489
Abstract: This article discusses the challenges and constraints on the way toward more ecumenical forms of world historical scholarship. Refuting the charge that world history is necessarily Eurocentric in nature, the article points out that it is impossible to discuss intercultural conceptions of world history without touching on the international structures, flows, and hierarchies that characterize the field. The article argues that several transformations within the social sciences and humanities may prove to be relevant for transcultural and world history. The article concludes that internationally convincing perspectives can be gained only if the international landscapes of historiography become more ecumenical.

The Problematic Authority of (World) History
Heather Sutherland
pp. 491-522
Abstract: Modern professional history developed in symbiosis with the bureaucratic nation-state and institutionalized science in nineteenth-century Europe, and the conventional grand narrative reflects an idealized view of modernity and modernization. Postcolonial states continued to conform, and location within the national narrative became central to entitlement. Any ostensibly universal account must try to transcend the epistemological and ideological bases of a heterogeneity of histories (vernacular, state-sponsored, and transnational), although any claim to epistemic sovereignty is entangled with the practice of power. Despite the realities of cultural difference and political interest, global interdependence requires a usable past. This article considers problems and possibilities.

BOOK REVIEWS

Sing C. Chew. The Recurring Dark Ages: Ecological Stress, Climate Changes, and System Transformation
Reviewed by Eva-Maria Swidler
pp. 523-525

Alexander Woodside. Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History
Reviewed by Katrina Gulliver
pp. 526-528

Amiya Kumar Bagchi. Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital
Reviewed by Stephen Philion
pp. 528-532

Sujit Sivasundaram. Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850
Reviewed by Niel Gunson
pp. 532-535

Tony Ballantyne. Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World
Reviewed by Thomas R. Metcalf
pp. 535-538

INDEX TO VOLUME 18, 539

ARTICLES

The Concept of “Decisive Battles” in World History
Yuval Noah Harari
pp. 251-266
Abstract: This article discusses the historiography of the concept of “decisive battles” and tries to explain both its popularity and its present eclipse, focusing in particular on the ideological and aesthetic foundations of the concept. The article further considers whether the concept might still be useful for the writing of world history. It concludes that there is some merit in the traditional view of decisive battles as events that change the course of history and bring a significant element of chaos into it. There is, however, less merit in the view of decisive battles as symbols for long-term historical developments.

Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World
Giancarlo Casale
pp. 267-296
Abstract: In the fall of 1588, the little-known Ottoman corsair Mir Ali Beg set sail from the Yemen with a small war fleet and headed for the Portuguese-controlled city-states of Africa’s Swahili coast. Although ultimately unsuccessful, his expedition was conceived as only the first step in an extended effort to create a centralized Ottoman imperial infrastructure throughout the Indian Ocean basin. And had it not been for the fortuitous intervention of several thousand “Zimba” warriors on the eve of the final encounter between Ottoman and Portuguese forces at Mombasa in March 1589, the available evidence suggests that Mir Ali and his men might very well have carried the day.

Socialist Paths in a Capitalist Conundrum: Reconsidering the German Catastrophe of 1933
William Smaldone
pp. 297-323
Abstract: The collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933 was a disaster of world-historical dimensions. While most historians focus on the Social Democratic role in that debacle primarily within its German and European contexts, this essay examines it within the broader framework of the global history of democratic socialism in the twentieth century. By comparing Social Democracy’s defeat in 1933 with the experiences of the Popular Unity Party in Chile in 1973, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1989, and the African National Congress in South Africa in 1994, the essay examines the Socialist failure in 1933 from a new perspective and raises questions about the dilemmas faced by democratic socialist movements in bringing about radical change.

Reconstructing World History in the People’s Republic of China since the 1980s
Luo Xu
pp. 325-350
Abstract: This article offers a critical review of the efforts made by Chinese historians since the 1980s to reconceptualize and reconstruct world history from a global perspective as well as the complex ideological, institutional, and sociopsychological issues that hindered their efforts. It argues that the success and failure of their work were in many ways related to the extent to which they were able (or unable) to overcome these barriers. The article discusses the new theoretical framework that Chinese historians developed, newly published world history texts, and reactions to recent Western scholarship. It concludes that, despite various problems, the Chinese historians’ efforts signified an important step in their long endeavor to envision a world history with Chinese characteristics.

FORUM: DEBATE ON SATI IN UNIVERSAL CONTEXT

Reconsidering “Sati in Universal Context”
Sarah Schneewind
pp. 353-360
Abstract: While world and comparative historians need not research each local instance in great depth, Jörg Fisch’s recent article “Dying for the Dead: Sati in Universal Context” neglects most of the research on a case he stresses, China. Fisch’s argument that only “outsiders” can end following in death practices overlooks how historical movements compromise such clear categorization and relies rhetorically on terms that foreclose the possibility of abolition by “insiders.” His claim that only “outsiders” have historically ended such practices overlooks the complexities of the effects (and causes) of colonialism and the unanswerable question of what might have happened without it. His choice to set aside in his analysis the means of death conflicts with evidence he provides that suggests means might have figured in women’s own calculations about how to demonstrate faithfulness to the dead, further foreclosing the possibility that insiders can change their own societies.

Sati and the Task of the Historian
Jörg Fisch, 361-368
Abstract: The article’s approach to sati and similar phenomena is functionally and morally neutral. A society that practices following in death is not, for that matter, considered inferior. Schneewind, however, pleads for a normative moral approach, ranking societies according to their ability to rid themselves of harmful customs. What in the article is shown as a mere functional difference between European (or Christian) and (some) non-Western societies thereby appears as an illegitimate Eurocentrism or ethnocentrism. Such a view should not be read into the text, as it will inhibit consideration of important questions.

BOOK REVIEWS

Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000
Reviewed by Suzanna Reiss
pp. 369-374

Natalie Zemon Davis. Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds
Reviewed by Edmund Burke III
pp. 372-374

Ernst van Veen and Leonard Blussé, eds. Rivalry and Conflict: European Traders and Asian Trading Networks in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Reviewed by Robert van Niel
pp. 374-377

Sugata Bose. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire
Reviewed by Ned Bertz
pp. 377-379

Myron Echenberg. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901
Reviewed by Dan Tamir
pp. 379-381