This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
This work describes how Islam was adapted by the seventeenth century Acehnese state to serve political and dynastic goals, and how its consequent profile as a champion of Islam raised its profile in regional contests for military and commercial dominance
This book takes a fascinating look at the role of the Arab-Islamic world in the rise of the West. It examines the cultural transmission of ideas and institutions in a number of key areas, including science, philosophy, humanism, law, finance, commerce, as well as the Arab-Islamic world's overall impact on the Reformation and the Renaissance.
Known as the greatest traveler of premodern times, Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta was born in Morocco in 1304 and educated in Islamic law. At the age of twenty-one, he left home to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca. This was only the first of a series of extraordinary journeys that spanned nearly three decades and took him not only eastward to India and China but also north to the Volga River valley and south to Tanzania. The narrative of these travels has been known to specialists in Islamic and medieval history for years. Ross E. Dunn's 1986 retelling of these tales, however, was the first work of scholarship to make the legendary traveler's story accessible to a general audience. Now updated with revisions, a new preface, and an updated bibliography, Dunn's classic interprets Ibn Battuta's adventures and places them within the rich, trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam.
“An absolutely unique work in linguistics publishing – full of beautiful maps and authoritative accounts of well-known and little-known language encounters. Essential reading (and map-viewing) for students of language contact with a global perspective.” Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath, Max-Planck-Institut für Evolutionäre Anthropologie The two text volumes cover a large geographical area, including Australia, New Zealand, Melanesia, South -East Asia (Insular and Continental), Oceania, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, Mongolia, Central Asia, the Caucasus Area, Siberia, Arctic Areas, Canada, Northwest Coast and Alaska, United States Area, Mexico, Central America, and South America. The Atlas is a detailed, far-reaching handbook of fundamental importance, dealing with a large number of diverse fields of knowledge, with the reported facts based on sound scholarly research and scientific findings, but presented in a form intelligible to non-specialists and educated lay persons in general.
Up to & including the Age of Discoveries, the wealth of the East was thought in Europe to consist primarily of spices & aromatics. Cloves, nutmeg, mace, & sandalwood all were thought to come from a few small islands in easternmost Indonesia, which no European reached before 1500. Yet supplies of these luxury products were reaching China, India, western Asia, & the Mediterranean lands more than a thousand years earlier. This study of Moluccan spices opens with their natural history & nomenclature, & the discovery of the Islands by Europeans near the opposing (& controversial) limits of Spanish & Portuguese jurisdiction. Donkin traces the expanding interest & long-distance trade in cloves, nutmeg, & sandalwood, first to India & then to the adjacent Arabo-Persian world. The medieval West & China lay on the margins of diffusion, the former in touch with the Levant, the latter with the trading world of South East Asia.
Presented in six principal analytic chapters with supporting appendices, this book explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europe’s twelfth century commercial renaissance. Employing the classic analytic techniques of economics, Gene Heck determines that medieval Europe’s feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns. He then proceeds by demonstrating how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empowered medieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in “Dark Age economics” ― in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism. While treatises such as Maxime Rodinson’s excellent book, Islam and Capitalism, document the capitalistic nature of the Islamic economic system, in applying modern economic method to medieval orientalist historiography, this work is unique in capturing both the evolution and the impact of the system’s role in forging medieval history.
The global is an instituted perspective, not just an empirical process. Adopted initially by the British in order to make sense of their polyglot territorial empire, the global perspective served to make heterogeneous spaces and nonwhite subjects "legible," and in effect produced the regions it sought merely to describe. The global was the dominant perspective from which the world was produced for representation and control. It also set the terms within which subjectivity and history came to be imagined by colonizers and modern anticolonial nationalists. In this book, Sanjay Krishnan demonstrates how ideas of the global took root in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century descriptions of Southeast Asia. Krishnan turns to the works of Adam Smith, Thomas De Quincey, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, and Joseph Conrad, four authors who discuss the Malay Archipelago during the rise and consolidation of the British Empire. These works offer some of the most explicit and sophisticated discussions of the world as a single, interconnected entity, inducting their readers into comprehensive and objective descriptions of the world. The perspective organizing these authors' conception of the global-the frame or code through which the world came into view-is indebted to the material and discursive possibilities set in motion by European conquest. The global, therefore, is not just a peculiar mode of thematization; it is aligned to a conception of historical development unique to European colonial capitalism. Krishnan troubles this dominant perspective. Drawing on the poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and challenging the recent historiography of empire and economic histories of globalization, he elaborates a bold new approach to the humanities in the age of globalization.
