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

ARTICLES

Similitude and Empire: On Comorian Strategies of Englishness
Jeremy Prestholdt
pp. 113–138
Abstract: This essay is an inquiry into the cultural domestication of globally circulating objects and symbols before colonialism. It seeks to reveal the efficacy of cross-societal performances of similarity—a strategy of appeal that I call similitude—by demonstrating how the strategic uses of imported consumer goods and cultural symbols by the people of Mutsamudu in the Comoros Islands affected British relationships to Mutsamuduans. Islanders adopted the materiality and social discourses of English gentility and through these claimed a moral proximity to the English, which they in turn used to leverage appeals for material and military assistance. By exploring the case of Mutsamuduan strategies of Englishness, we can better appreciate how cultural appropriations in even seemingly marginal locales have historically affected global interrelations.

FORUM: GLOBALIZATION AND GLOBAL CITIES

Globalization, Cosmopolitanism, and the Dönme in Ottoman Salonica and Turkish Istanbul
Marc Baer
pp. 141–169
Abstract: This article provides a narrative of the rise and fall of two global cities, imperial Ottoman Salonica and nationalist Turkish Istanbul, as well as the experience of a marginal religious group known as the Dönme, descendants of seventeenth-century Jewish converts to Islam who formed a distinctive group of Muslims in both cities, and the interrupted trajectories of indigenous globalization. It argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, indigenous religious groups with transregional connections created alternate nodes of long-since forgotten globalization in marginal spaces at the fringes of empire, but that nation-states that replaced empire limited their abilities by controlling the flow of finance and people, making their resources useless in provincialized global cities. This article thus explains why the globalizing economic and cosmopolitan cultural role of the Dönme should have a place in debates on the global city.

Globalization, Architecture, and Town Planning in a Colonial City: The Case of Jaffa and Tel Aviv
Mark Levine
pp. 171–198
Abstract: This article explores how modernity and globalization unfolded in the neighboring cities of Jaffa and Tel Aviv during the long twentieth century. Each city was the cultural and economic capital of its respective national community, because of which they were in continual contact and conflict in a manner that often muddied the nationalistically determined boundaries between them. I explore how, beginning with Tel Aviv’s establishment in 1909, Zionist leaders deployed a narrative of progress and modernity versus tradition and stagnation to effect a discursive, and ultimately a physical, erasure of the Palestinian Arab population of the region surrounding both towns. I argue that such paradigms, and the ideologies that support them, are fundamental components of globalization, whether in the era of “high imperialism” when Jaffa and Tel Aviv’s conflict began, or today. Next I move to the contemporary period and explore the intersection of globalization, tourism, and the liberalized market. I conclude by discussing how a “spatialization” of the contemporary Jaffa is crucial to understanding the continuing conflict between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, both within the borders of 1967 Israel and across the Green Line as well.

Is Global Shanghai “Good to Think”? Thoughts on Comparative History and Post-Socialist Cities
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
pp. 199–234
Abstract: Shanghai is routinely described as “unique,” yet also routinely likened to other places. It thus alternately invites and defies categorization. After introducing general methodological concerns and providing basic information about the main historical stages through which Shanghai has passed, this article focuses on the period of rapid development and re-engagement with the world that began in the early 1980s, arguing that a particularly productive way to think about today’s Shanghai is as a “reglobalizing postsocialist” urban center—a category that also, for example, includes Budapest.

BOOK REVIEWS

William H. McNeill et al., eds. Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History
Reviewed by Herbert F. Ziegler
pp. 235–237

Peter A. Coclanis, ed. The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel
Reviewed by Elizabeth Mancke
pp. 237–240

Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, eds. Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America
Reviewed by Marcia Schmidt Blaine
pp. 240–243

David M. Deal and Laura Hostetler, trans. The At of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao Album”
Reviewed by Shana J. Brown
pp. 243–247

Paul Spickard, ed. Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World
Reviewed by Tony Ballantyne
pp. 247–249

Perspectives on the Global Past

Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities, Yinghong Cheng (2007)

Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. by Jerry H. Bentley; Renate Bridenthal; Kären Wigen (2007)

Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World, ed. by Victor H. Mair (2005)

Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History, ed. by Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Anand A. Yang (2005)

ARTICLES

Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction: Turco-Mongol Imperial Identity on the Subcontinent
Lisa Balabanlilar

pp. 1-39
Abstract: Re-evaluating the scholarly and intellectual isolation with which India’s Mughal empire has been treated, this study identifies the Mughals as direct descendants of Chinggis Khan and Tamerlane (Timur). It also explores the systematic manipulation of their Central Asian legacy through which the Mughals defined and defended their imperial identity and political viability on the South Asian subcontinent. In identifying and examining Mughal loyalty to Turco-Mongol institutions and traditions, the study positions the Mughal dynasty in the center of the early modern Islamic world as the direct successor of a powerful political and religious tradition.

FORUM: SOCIAL HISTORY, WOMEN’S HISTORY, AND WORLD HISTORY

Social History and World History: Prospects for Collaboration
Peter N. Stearns
pp. 43-52

Abstract: This article discusses the several reasons for the complex relationship between social history and world history. It notes also the increasing interest among social historians for reconsidering their geographical range and base, which provides new opportunities for interaction between the fields. Using childhood as an example, the article argues for the mutual utility of running social history topics through world history periodization and related concerns with interregional contacts.

World History and the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Merry Wiesner-Hanks
pp. 53-67

Abstract: Women’s history had its origins in the women’s movement and in the new social history, and like other areas of social history, it has seen relatively few interchanges with world history as both have developed over the past twenty years. This article suggests some of the reasons for this lack of intersection; assesses recent scholarship that brings world history and the history of women, gender, and sexuality together; and suggests future directions.

Social History and World History: From Daily Life to Patterns of Change
Kenneth Pomeranz
pp. 69-98

Abstract: This article asks how questions from social history can be more closely integrated into world history and vice versa. It highlights cases in which this has already happened and suggests avenues for further development. It divides social history into three different types: history of daily life, history of social organization, and history of social movements and deliberate attempts to induce social change, whether from the top down or from the bottom up. The last kind of social history is particularly difficult to frame as world history, partly because we lack terms for collective agents that are agreed to be useful across cultural lines. But developing such a vocabulary remains necessary. The last section of the article examines how social histories of empire offer some approaches that are promising for this purpose.

BOOK REVIEWS

Richard W. Bulliet. The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization
Reviewed by Howard J. Dooley
pp. 99-103

Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína. Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleets in the Sixteenth Century
Reviewed by Céline Dauverd
pp. 103-106

Herman Lebovics. Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies
Reviewed by Jeremy Black
pp. 106-107

Michael Adas. Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission
Reviewed by Daniel R. Headrick
pp. 108-110

Maria Kousis and Charles Tilly. Economic and Political Contention in Comparative Perspective
Reviewed by Peter T. Manicas
pp. 110-112

ARTICLES

Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems
Michael N. Pearson
pp. 353–373
Abstract: In any study of seascapes, an investigation of the littoral must be central, for it is here that land and sea meet. Is there such a thing as littoral society? Is it possible to go around the shores of an ocean, or a sea, or indeed the whole world and identify societies that have more in common with other littoral societies than they do with their inland neighbors? If so, do these societies draw more on their forelands—that is, their maritime connections—than on their hinterlands? Fishing peoples, who ostensibly are quintessential littoral peoples, exemplify the difficulties of this identification. While their men draw their livelihood from the sea, their women engage in processing and marketing on land, and the whole fishing community is dependent on land-based economic forces. Many fishing communities engage in agriculture as well as piscatorial activity. Concepts of littoral society need to be sensitive to gradations along the strand, from the more aquatic Marsh Arabs and peddlers at the floating markets in Bangkok to peasants who happen to live on the coast. Three criteria in particular need attention: location, occupation, and culture.

Audience for a Giraffe: European Expansionism and the Quest for the Exotic
Erik Ringmar
pp. 375–397
Abstract: The two main waves of European expansion—those of the Renaissance and of the nineteenth century—cannot simply be explained in economic terms. The high degree of risk and uncertainty associated with overseas ventures meant that they were less than fully rational. An explanation must begin by considering how the Europeans defined the extra-European world, how they defined the exotic. This article analyzes European reactions to two giraffes—one given to Lorenzo de’ Medici of Florence in 1486 and the other to King Charles X of France in 1827. A comparison is made with the Chinese reactions to two giraffes that appeared in Beijing in the early fifteenth century.

The Science of Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire
Paula de Vos
pp. 399–427
Abstract: This article explores the Spanish crown’s efforts to study, cultivate, and transplant spices from the East Indies to the West Indies and then to Spain in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Beginning with Christopher Columbus’s first observations of New World flora, the Spanish crown sought out spices to cultivate for economic gain. Although they were ultimately unsuccessful in efforts to generate a large-scale spice trade, colonial officials and local entrepreneurs participated in a coordinated program of empirical information gathering and botanical experimentation that is itself of historical significance. For the empirical and experimental—“scientific”—methods they represented serve to challenge and enhance current understanding of several historiographical themes: the origins of economic botany and the Scientific Revolution more generally, the role of human agency in the Columbian exchange, and the dissemination of knowledge from imperial centers to colonial peripheries.

The Rise and Fall of Dutch Taiwan, 1624–1662: Cooperative Colonization and the Statist Model of European Expansion
Tonio Andrade
pp. 429–450
Abstract: This study, based on Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese sources, examines the rise and fall of Dutch Taiwan in the light of a model of European expansion first sketched (separately) by historians John E. Wills Jr. and Michael N. Pearson. According to the Wills-Pearson model, Europeans were successful in colonization attempts because they received support from European states, whereas Asian states were less likely to support overseas adventurism. The case of Taiwan strongly supports the model—not just the establishment of a Dutch colony on Taiwan, but also the loss of that colony to the Chinese military leader Zheng Chenggong, who ousted the Dutch in 1662, because Zheng’s state was similar to many western European states in its dependence upon revenue from seaborne commerce and its concomitant willingness to undertake overseas expansion. The article concludes by urging scholars to learn more about non-Western colonization, suggesting several possible avenues of research.

BOOK REVIEWS

Bruce Mazlish. Civilization and Its Contents
Reviewed by Cemil Aydin
pp. 451–454

José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France, eds. Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade
Reviewed by Alberto E. Nickerson
pp. 454–456

Inga Clendinnen. Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact
Reviewed by Ani Fox
pp. 456–458

Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, eds. Globalization: A Short History
Reviewed by Colin Rowan
pp. 458–461

Jeremy Black. War Since 1945
Reviewed by Jefferson P. Marquis
pp. 461–463

Index to Volume 17, pp. 465–469

ARTICLES

Afanasii Nikitin: An Orthodox Russian’s Spiritual Voyage in the Dar al-Islam, 1468–1475
Mary Jane Maxwell
pp. 243–266
Abstract: Recent scholarship on premodern religious conversion emphasizes the political, social, and economic incentives for the mass conversion of whole societies. Such investigations tend to neglect individual accounts that typically offer a personal and spiritual explanation for conversion. The travel account of Afanasii Nikitin, a Russian merchant who ventured through Persia and India from 1468 to 1475, presents an opportunity to examine the spiritual considerations that influenced one individual’s experience. Nikitin’s narrative is significant because it brings focus to secular and spiritual motivations for conversion.

Paying for the Privilege: The Management of Public Order and Religious Pluralism in Two Early Modern Societies
Charles H. Parker
pp. 267–296
Abstract: A cross-cultural analysis of the management of religious pluralism in the early modern era can serve to contextualize and relativize our understanding of toleration in the Western world. To that end, this article compares policies and practices employed by governments in the Protestant Dutch Republic concerning Roman Catholics with those used by Sunni Ottoman authorities toward Christians, Jews, and Shi’ites in Arabic-speaking provinces. Despite important differences in approach, authorities in both societies managed their pluralistic environments by marginalizing minorities in various ways. Their practice served to protect the public religious order while also according minorities the privilege of private worship.

Diplomats and Poets: “Power and Perceptions” in American Encounters with Japan, 1860
David Scott
pp. 297–337
Abstract: America’s encounter with Japan took place not only in Japan from 1854 onward but also in the United States itself, as signaled by the visit of a Japanese embassy to the American east and west coasts during the summer of 1860—a trip that Walt Whitman famously profiled in his poem “A Broadway Pageant.” This article discusses the contexts for this encounter of civilizations on American soil by examining the events of the visit itself and Whitman’s responses to it. In doing so, the article comments on American perceptions of Japan and also analyzes the power relationships at work in the encounter.

BOOK REVIEWS

Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds. The Creation of the British Atlantic World
Reviewed by Edward E. Andrews
pp. 339–342

John C. Weaver. The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900
Reviewed by Sumner J. La Croix
pp. 342–344

Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds. Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History
Reviewed by Rochona Majumdar
pp. 345–347

Yuri Slezkine. The Jewish Century
Reviewed by ChaeRan Y. Freeze
pp. 347–350

Roger Chickering, Stig Förster, and Bernd Greiner, eds. A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1937–1945
Reviewed by Jeremy Black
pp. 350–352

ARTICLES

Homo sapiens Populates the Earth: A Provisional Synthesis, Privileging Linguistic Evidence
Patrick Manning
pp. 115–158
Abstract: Information on historical linguistics can make a substantial contribution to the understanding of early migrations of Homo sapiens within Africa and throughout the world. This essay summarizes the distribution of language groups around the world and applies basic techniques for analyzing the paths of migration associated with language evolution. The analysis relies on the approach of Joseph H. Greenberg to language classification, but it also reviews the continuing differences among linguists on the classification of languages and calls for more study to resolve those differences. The interpretation distinguishes between an initial human colonization of the tropics along Indian Ocean shores and a later occupation of temperate Eurasia and the Americas.

Royal French Women in the Ottoman Sultans’ Harem: The Political Uses of Fabricated Accounts from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century
Christine Isom-Verhaaren
pp. 159–196
Abstract: The Ottoman sultans’ harem has provided fertile ground for the invention of tales that have been incorporated into the historical tradition. The purported presence of royal French women in the harem has been used for political purposes since the sixteenth century. These tales fall into two groups: myths about a fictional fifteenth-century French princess and fantasies concerning Nakshidil, a nineteenth-century valide sultan who some authors claim was a relative of Napoleon’s wife Josephine. The earlier myths explained the alliance between the Ottoman sultan and the king of France. Fables about Nakshidil have come to symbolize the oppression of women by Islam.

American Missionaries and the Opium Trade in Nineteenth-Century China
Michael C. Lazich
pp. 197–224
Abstract: America’s earliest missionaries to China in the mid-nineteenth century played a key role in the formulation of early Sino-American relations. This paper explores the changing influence missionaries had on American policy toward the opium trade as reflected in the provisions of the Treaty of Wangxia (1844) and the American Treaty of Tianjin (1858). As missionary attitudes toward the opium issue shifted in a subtle but significant manner in the years following the Opium War, so too did the official position of the American government as embodied in the provisions of these treaties and supplemental commercial agreements.

BOOK REVIEWS

Nicholas Ostler. Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Reviewed by Frances Karttunen and Alfred W. Crosby
pp. 225–228

Ken S. Coates. A Global History of Indigenous Peoples: Struggle and Survival
Reviewed by J.N.F.M. á Campo
pp. 228–231

Fa-ti Fan. British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter
Reviewed by Kai-Wing Chow
pp. 231–233

Geoffrey Jones. Multinationals and Global Capitalism from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century
Reviewed by Clifford L. Staples
pp. 233–237

Mark Sedgwick. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century
Reviewed by Colin Beech
pp. 237–239

Robert Bickers. The Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai
Reviewed by Marcia R. Ristaino
pp. 240–241

ARTICLES

FORUM: VIOLENCE IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC WORLD

Beyond Encounters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Violence in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1492–1700
Brian Sandberg
pp. 1–26
Abstract: At the time of the quincentennial commemoration of the Columbian voyages in 1992, historical scholarship on the Atlantic world revolved around the theme of “encounters.” More recent research emphasizes the centrality of violence in the Columbian exchange. This article introduces the three following essays presented in this issue and analyzes the historical literature dealing with ethnic and religious violence in the early modern Atlantic world. Focusing particularly on the dynamics of captivity and atrocity, the author suggests that the patterns of violence developed in the early mod­ern Atlantic world may have served as a model for the globalization of violence.

Franciscans, Indian Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in New Spain, 1536–1543
Patricia Lopes Don
pp. 27–50
Abstract: When Spanish settlers went to the Americas, they took with them institutions that had been central to their colonization of medieval Iberia, including the Inquisition. While the main interests of the crown and the church were to prevent the establishment of Judaism, Islam, and Protestant Christianity in the New World, the first bishop of New Spain, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, was soon drawn into applying the rigors of the Inquisition against the paganism of some thirty, mostly indigenous, leaders in the years 1536–1543. This paper analyzes the second trial in the series, that of the native sorcerer Martin Ocelotl, which alarmed religious authorities about the continuation of paganism in the Valley of Mexico and became a turning point in the escalation of religious violence against native leaders.

Hans Staden’s Captive Soul: Identity, Imperialism, and Rumors of Cannibalism in Sixteenth-Century Brazil
H. E. Martel
pp. 51–70
Abstract: This article examines the ways sixteenth-century reports of cultural cannibalism among the Tupinamba of Brazil were employed strategically by Europeans and Brazilians in the contest for economic, spiritual, and cultural dominance in the Atlantic world. By focusing on the experience of captivity among the Tupinamba by Hans Staden of Germany, this essay also explores the use of the cannibal by one ordinary man, as he negotiated dangerous limitations on identity and free will in the context of Reformation and imperial battles to possess both bodies and souls.

“To Fear and to Love Us”: Intercultural Violence in the English Atlantic
Melanie Perreault
pp. 71–94
Abstract: This article examines the interconnection of notions of fear and love during English exploration and colonization in the Atlantic world in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. English promotional literature argued that the English were uniquely qualified to establish a loving relationship with the native peoples they encountered. Increasing violence, however, presented a significant challenge to that image. By recasting intercultural violence as a natural component of a hierarchical yet intimate relationship, English accounts placed otherwise questionable actions into an acceptable framework that did not threaten their carefully constructed image as protectors of dependent Indians.

BOOK REVIEWS

Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, eds. Mongols, Turks, and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World
Reviewed by Christopher J. Ward
pp. 95–97

Rémi Brague. Teresa Lavender Fagan, trans. The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought
Reviewed by Fabio López-Lázaro
pp. 97–101

Victor Lieberman. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, Volume I: Integration on the Mainland
Reviewed by Liam C. Kelley
pp. 102–104

Bernard Bailyn. Atlantic History: Concept and Contours
Reviewed by William E. Doody
pp. 105–107

Irene Silverblatt. Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World
Reviewed by Nils P. Jacobsen
pp. 107–110

Lynn A. Struve, ed. The Qing Formation in World-Historical Time
Reviewed by Laura Hostetler
pp. 110–112

Jeremi Suri. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente
Reviewed by Sharon A. Kowalsky
pp. 112–114