The Rise of Trans-Eurasian Exchange
The Rise of Trans-Eurasian Exchange

Author: Ting An

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-30

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9819970350

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This book has re-visited two distinctive patterns, namely pottery and millet, the movement of both of which conflict with conventional narratives concerning prehistoric trans-Eurasian exchange. The significance of this lies beyond the simple matter of chronology, but rests on the relationship between the movement of agricultural resources and of other items of material culture. Studies on early west–east interaction have attracted researchers from various disciplines, such as archaeology, history, Asian studies, art history, etc. Pursuing an archaeological approach, the book re-examines two of the earliest evidences of trans-Eurasian cultural exchange. The book is intended for researchers who are interested in prehistory, archaeobotany, pottery studies and comparative studies of early civilizations.

Entangled Itineraries
Entangled Itineraries

Author: Pamela H. Smith

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2019-05-22

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0822986701

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Trade flowed across Eurasia, around the Indian Ocean, and over the Mediterranean for millennia, but in the early modern period, larger parts of the globe became connected through these established trade routes. Knowledge, embodied in various people, materials, texts, objects, and practices, also moved and came together along these routes in hubs of exchange where different social and cultural groups intersected and interacted. Entangled Itineraries traces this movement of knowledge across the Eurasian continent from the early years of the Common Era to the nineteenth century, following local goods, techniques, tools, and writings as they traveled and transformed into new material and intellectual objects and ways of knowing. Focusing on nonlinear trajectories of knowledge in motion, this volume follows itineraries that weaved in and out of busy, crowded cosmopolitan cities in China; in the trade hubs of Kucha and Malacca; and in centers of Arabic scholarship, such as Reyy and Baghdad, which resonated in Bursa, Assam, and even as far as southern France. Contributors explore the many ways in which materials, practices, and knowledge systems were transformed and codified as they converged, swelled, at times disappeared, and often reemerged anew.

The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction
The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction

Author: James A. Millward

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-04-26

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0199782865

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The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction is a new look at an ancient subject: the silk road that linked China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean across the expanses of Central Asia. James A. Millward highlights unusual but important biological, technological and cultural exchanges over the silk roads that stimulated development across Eurasia and underpin civilization in our modern, globalized world.

Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity
Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity

Author: Nicola Di Cosmo

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 1284

ISBN-13: 1108547001

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Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity offers an integrated picture of Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes during a formative period of world history. In the half millennium between 250 and 750 CE, settled empires underwent deep structural changes, while various nomadic peoples of the steppes (Huns, Avars, Turks, and others) experienced significant interactions and movements that changed their societies, cultures, and economies. This was a transformational era, a time when Roman, Persian, and Chinese monarchs were mutually aware of court practices, and when Christians and Buddhists criss-crossed the Eurasian lands together with merchants and armies. It was a time of greater circulation of ideas as well as material goods. This volume provides a conceptual frame for locating these developments in the same space and time. Without arguing for uniformity, it illuminates the interconnections and networks that tied countless local cultural expressions to far-reaching inter-regional ones.

The Prehistory of the Silk Road
The Prehistory of the Silk Road

Author: E. E. Kuzmina

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2015-02-23

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0812292332

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In ancient and medieval times, the Silk Road was of great importance to the transport of peoples, goods, and ideas between the East and the West. A vast network of trade routes, it connected the diverse geographies and populations of China, the Eurasian Steppe, Central Asia, India, Western Asia, and Europe. Although its main use was for importing silk from China, traders moving in the opposite direction carried to China jewelry, glassware, and other exotic goods from the Mediterranean, jade from Khotan, and horses and furs from the nomads of the Steppe. In both directions, technology and ideologies were transmitted. The Silk Road brought together the achievements of the different peoples of Eurasia to advance the Old World as a whole. The majority of the Silk Road routes passed through the Eurasian Steppe, whose nomadic people were participants and mediators in its economic and cultural exchanges. Until now, the origins of these routes and relationships have not been examined in great detail. In The Prehistory of the Silk Road, E. E. Kuzmina, renowned Russian archaeologist, looks at the history of this crucial area before the formal establishment of Silk Road trade and diplomacy. From the late Neolithic period to the early Bronze Age, Kuzmina traces the evolution of the material culture of the Steppe and the contact between civilizations that proved critical to the development of the widespread trade that would follow, including nomadic migrations, the domestication and use of the horse and the camel, and the spread of wheeled transport. The Prehistory of the Silk Road combines detailed research in archaeology with evidence from physical anthropology, linguistics, and other fields, incorporating both primary and secondary sources from a range of languages, including a vast accumulation of Russian-language scholarship largely untapped in the West. The book is complemented by an extensive bibliography that will be of great use to scholars.

Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean
Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean

Author: K. N. Chaudhuri

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1985-03-07

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780521285421

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Before the age of Industrial Revolution, the great Asian civilisations constituted areas not only of high culture but also of advanced economic development.

The Merchants of Siberia
The Merchants of Siberia

Author: Erika L. Monahan

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 150170396X

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In The Merchants of Siberia, Erika Monahan reconsiders commerce in early modern Russia by reconstructing the trading world of Siberia and the careers of merchants who traded there. She follows the histories of three merchant families from various social ranks who conducted trade in Siberia for well over a century. These include the Filat'evs, who were among Russia’s most illustrious merchant elite; the Shababins, Muslim immigrants who mastered local and long-distance trade while balancing private endeavors with service to the Russian state; and the Noritsyns, traders of more modest status who worked sometimes for themselves, sometimes for bigger merchants, and participated in the emerging Russia-China trade. Monahan demonstrates that trade was a key component of how the Muscovite state sought to assert its authority in the Siberian periphery. The state’s recognition of the benefits of commerce meant that Russian state- and empire-building in Siberia were characterized by accommodation; in this diverse borderland, instrumentality trumped ideology and the Orthodox state welcomed Central Asian merchants of Islamic faith. This reconsideration of Siberian trade invites us to rethink Russia’s place in the early modern world. The burgeoning market at Lake Yamysh, an inner-Eurasian trading post along the Irtysh River, illuminates a vibrant seventeenth-century Eurasian caravan trade even as Europe-Asia maritime trade increased. By contextualizing merchants and places of Siberian trade in the increasingly connected economies of the early modern period, Monahan argues that, commercially speaking, Russia was not the "outlier" that most twentieth-century characterizations portrayed.

The Oxford Handbook of World History
The Oxford Handbook of World History

Author: the late Jerry H. Bentley

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2011-03-31

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 0199235813

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Thirty-three essays by a stellar collection of distinguished scholars in the field of world history, providing a comprehensive guide to current scholarship and current thinking in one of the most dynamic fields of historical scholarship

The Cambridge World History
The Cambridge World History

Author: Jerry H. Bentley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-04-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780521761628

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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.

Pre-Islamic Arabia
Pre-Islamic Arabia

Author: Valentina A. Grasso

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-02-28

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1009252976

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This book delves into the political and cultural developments of pre-Islamic Arabia, focusing on the religious attitudes of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension into the Syrian desert. Between the third and the seventh century, Arabia was on the edge of three great empires (Iran, Rome and Aksūm) and at the centre of a lucrative network of trade routes. Valentina Grasso offers an interpretative framework which contextualizes the choice of Arabian elites to become Jewish sympathisers and/or convert to Christianity and Islam by probing the mobilization of faith in the shaping of Arabian identities. For the first time the Arabians of the period are granted autonomy from marginalizing (mostly Western) narratives framing them as 'barbarians' inhabiting the fringes of Rome and Iran and/or deterministic analyses in which they are depicted retrospectively as exemplified by the Muslims' definition of the period as Jāhilīyah, 'ignorance'.