Download or read book Empires and Communities in the Post Roman and Islamic World C 400 1000 CE written by Walter Pohl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Empires are not an under-researched topic. Recently, there has been a veritable surge in comparative and conceptual studies, not least of pre-modern empires. The distant past can tell us much about the fates of empires that may still be relevant today, and contemporary historians as well as the general public are generally aware of that. Tracing the general development of an empire, we can discern a kind imperial dynamic which follows the momentum of expansion, relies on the structures and achievements of the formative period for a while, and tends to be caught in a downward spiral at some point. Yet single cases differ so much that a general model is hardly ever sufficient.There is in fact little consensus about what exactly constitutes an empire, and it has become standard in publications about empires to note the profusion of definitions.Some refer to size-for instance, 'greater than a million square kilometers', as Peter Turchin suggested. Apart from that, many scholars offer more or less extensive lists of qualitative criteria. Some of these criteria reflect the imperial dynamic, for instance, the imposition of some kind of unity through 'an imperial project', which allows moving broad populations 'from coercion through co-optation to cooperation and identification'"--

Download or read book Empires and Communities in the Post Roman and Islamic World C 400 1000 CE written by Walter Pohl and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Empires are not an under-researched topic. Recently, there has been a veritable surge in comparative and conceptual studies, not least of pre-modern empires. The distant past can tell us much about the fates of empires that may still be relevant today, and contemporary historians as well as the general public are generally aware of that. Tracing the general development of an empire, we can discern a kind imperial dynamic which follows the momentum of expansion, relies on the structures and achievements of the formative period for a while, and tends to be caught in a downward spiral at some point. Yet single cases differ so much that a general model is hardly ever sufficient.There is in fact little consensus about what exactly constitutes an empire, and it has become standard in publications about empires to note the profusion of definitions.Some refer to size-for instance, 'greater than a million square kilometers', as Peter Turchin suggested. Apart from that, many scholars offer more or less extensive lists of qualitative criteria. Some of these criteria reflect the imperial dynamic, for instance, the imposition of some kind of unity through 'an imperial project', which allows moving broad populations 'from coercion through co-optation to cooperation and identification'"--

Download or read book Emerging Powers in Eurasian Comparison 200 1100 written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-07 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the fall and persistence of empires from the perspective of the powers that replaced them, and compares several cases between China and the West in the first millennium CE with surprisingly similar beginnings and different outcomes.

Download or read book The Abbasid and Carolingian Empires written by D.G. Tor and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Circa AD 750, both the Islamic world and western Europe underwent political revolutions; these raised to power, respectively, the ʿAbbasid and Carolingian dynasties. The eras thus inaugurated were similar not only in their chronology, but also in the foundational role each played in its respective civilization, forming and shaping enduring religious, cultural, and societal institutions. The ʿAbbāsid and Carolingian Empires: Studies in Civilizational Formation, is the first collected volume ever dedicated specifically to comparative Carolingian-ʿAbbasid history. In it, editor D.G. Tor brings together essays from some of the leading historians in order to elucidate some of the parallel developments in each of these civilizations, many of which persisted not only throughout the Middle Ages, but to the present day. Contributors are: Michael Cook, Jennifer R. Davis, Robert Gleave, Eric J. Goldberg, Minoru Inaba, Jürgen Paul, Walter Pohl, D.G. Tor and Ian Wood.

Download or read book The Historian of Islam at Work written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 694 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Historian of Islam at Work is a volume in honor of Hugh N. Kennedy. It offers thirty contributions by three generations of prominent scholars in the field of pre-modern Middle Eastern studies, covering the many areas of Islamic historical inquiry in which Hugh Kennedy has been active throughout his career. Grouped around four major themes - Caliphate and power, economy and society, Abbasids, and frontiers and the others - the contributions deal with the history, archaeology, architecture and literature of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond, from the time of the Prophet until the fifteenth century.

Download or read book Roman and Local Citizenship in the Long Second Century CE written by Myles Lavan and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction / Clifford Ando and Myles Lavan -- Citizenship and its alternatives : a view from the East / Ari Z. Bryen -- Fiscal semantics in the long second century : citizenship, taxation, and the constitutio Antoniniana / Lisa Pilar Eberle -- Roman citizenship, marriage with non-citizens and family networks / Myles Lavan -- Manumission, citizenship, and inheritance : epigraphic evidence from the Danube / Rose MacLean -- The onomastics of Roman citizenship in the Greek East : from 'Second Sophistic' to local epigraphic loyalty / Aitor Blanco-Pérez -- Documenting Roman citizenship / Anna Dolganov -- Citizenships and jurisdictions : the Greek city perspective / Georgy Kantor -- Experiencing Roman citizenship in the Greek East during the second century CE : local contexts for a global phenomenon / Cédric Brélaz -- Romans, aliens and others in dynamic interaction / Clifford Ando.

Download or read book City Citizen Citizenship 400 1500 written by Els Rose and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Xiongnu written by Bryan K Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book raises the case of the world's first nomadic empire, the Xiongnu, as a prime example of the sophisticated developments and powerful influence of nomadic regimes. Launching from a reconceptualization of the social and economic institutions of mobile pastoralists, the collective chapters trace the course of the Xiongnu Empire from before its initial rise, traversing the wars that challenged it and the reformations that made it stronger, to the legacy left after its eventual fall. Xiongnu expounds the economic practices and social conventions of steppe herders as fertile foundations for institutions and infrastructure of empire, and renders a model of "empires of mobilities," which engaged the control less of towns and territories and more of the movements of communities and capital to fuel their regimes. By weaving together archaeological examinations with historical investigations, Bryan K. Miller presents a more complex and nuanced narrative of how an empire based firmly in the steppe over two thousand years ago managed to formulate a robust political economy and a complex political matrix that capitalized on mobilities and alternative forms of political participation, and allowed the Xiongnu to dominate vast realms of central Eurasia and leave lasting geopolitical effects on the many worlds around them.

Download or read book Architecture of Anxiety Body Politics and the Formation of Islamic Architecture written by Heba Mostafa and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-04 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structured as five microhistories c. 632-705, this book offers a counternarrative for the formation of Islamic architecture and the Islamic state. It adopts a novel periodization informed by moments of historical violence and anxiety around caliphal identities in flux, animating histories of the minbar, throne, and maqsura as a principal nexus for navigating this anxiety. It expands outward to re-assess the mosque and palace with a focus on the Qubbat al-Khadraʾ and the Dar al-Imara in Kufa. It culminates in a reading of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem as a site where eschatological anxieties and political survival converge.

Download or read book From House Societies to States written by Juan Carlos Moreno Garcia and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The organization and characteristics of early and ancient states have become the focus of a renewed interest from archaeologists, ancient historians and anthropologists in recent years. On the one hand, neo-evolutionary schemas of political transformation find it difficult to define some of their most basic concepts, such as ‘chiefdom’, ‘complex chiefdom’ and ‘state’, not to mention the transition between them. On the other hand, teleological interpretations based on linear dynamics, from less to increasingly more complex political structures, in successive steps, impose biased and too rigid views on the available evidence. In fact, recent research stresses the existence of other forms of socio-political organization, less vertically integrated and more heterarchical, that proved highly successful and resilient in the long term in tying together social groups. What is more, such forms quite often represented the basic blocks on which states were built and that managed to survive once states collapsed. Finally, nomadic, maritime and mountain populations provide fascinating examples of societies that experienced alternative forms of political organization, sometimes on a seasonal basis. In other cases, their consideration as ‘marginal’ populations that cultivated specialized skills ensured them a certain degree of autonomy when living either within or at the borders of states. This book explores such small-scale socio-political organizations, their potential and the historical trajectories they stimulated. A selection of historical case studies from different regions of the world may help rethink current concepts and views about the emergence and organization of political complexity and the mechanisms that prevented, occasionally, the emergence of solid polities. They may also cast some light over trajectories of historical transformation, still poorly understood as are the limits of effective state power. This book explores the importance of comparative research and long-term historical perspectives to avoid simplistic interpretations, based on the characteristics of modern Western states abusively used retrospectively.

Download or read book The Age of Liutprand written by Christopher Heath and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-11-14 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Age of Liutprand provides a thematic analysis of Lombard Italy in the pivotal early part of the 8th century. It surveys the crucial role and rule of Liutprand [712-44], the powerful and effective Lombard king. By restoring this successful exemplar of Lombard kingship to the centre of events and developments in the Italian peninsula, this book pulls together all the pertinent evidence for a 'new' kingship in Lombard Italy that used a sophisticated set of strategies to enhance, deepen and expand its effectiveness. In presenting an evaluation of Italy on the cusp of dramatic change, this book explains how not only the kingship of Liutprand, but also his legal reforms and his relationships with the Church and neighbouring peoples all contributed to a model of kingship successfully and subsequently deployed by Charlemagne and his successors later in the 8th century.

Download or read book Empires of Faith written by Peter Sarris and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A panoramic account of the history of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East from the fall of Rome to the rise of Islam.

Download or read book The Inheritance of Rome written by Chris Wickham and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-01-29 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that with the decline of the Roman Empire Europe entered into some immense ‘dark age’ has long been viewed as inadequate by many historians. How could a world still so profoundly shaped by Rome and which encompassed such remarkable societies as the Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian empires, be anything other than central to the development of European history? How could a world of so many peoples, whether expanding, moving or stable, of Goths, Franks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, whose genetic and linguistic inheritors we all are, not lie at the heart of how we understand ourselves? The Inheritance of Rome is a work of remarkable scope and ambition. Drawing on a wealth of new material, it is a book which will transform its many readers’ ideas about the crucible in which Europe would in the end be created. From the collapse of the Roman imperial system to the establishment of the new European dynastic states, perhaps this book’s most striking achievement is to make sense of an immensely long period of time, experienced by many generations of Europeans, and which, while it certainly included catastrophic invasions and turbulence, also contained long periods of continuity and achievement. From Ireland to Constantinople, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this is a genuinely Europe-wide history of a new kind, with something surprising or arresting on every page.

Download or read book Rome and China written by Walter Scheidel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-05 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transcending ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries, early empires shaped thousands of years of world history. Yet despite the global prominence of empire, individual cases are often studied in isolation. This series seeks to change the terms of the debate by promoting cross-cultural, comparative, and transdisciplinary perspectives on imperial state formation prior to the European colonial expansion. Two thousand years ago, up to one-half of the human species was contained within two political systems, the Roman empire in western Eurasia (centered on the Mediterranean Sea) and the Han empire in eastern Eurasia (centered on the great North China Plain). Both empires were broadly comparable in terms of size and population, and even largely coextensive in chronological terms (221 BCE to 220 CE for the Qin/Han empire, c. 200 BCE to 395 CE for the unified Roman empire). At the most basic level of resolution, the circumstances of their creation are not very different. In the East, the Shang and Western Zhou periods created a shared cultural framework for the Warring States, with the gradual consolidation of numerous small polities into a handful of large kingdoms which were finally united by the westernmost marcher state of Qin. In the Mediterranean, we can observe comparable political fragmentation and gradual expansion of a unifying civilization, Greek in this case, followed by the gradual formation of a handful of major warring states (the Hellenistic kingdoms in the east, Rome-Italy, Syracuse and Carthage in the west), and likewise eventual unification by the westernmost marcher state, the Roman-led Italian confederation. Subsequent destabilization occurred again in strikingly similar ways: both empires came to be divided into two halves, one that contained the original core but was more exposed to the main barbarian periphery (the west in the Roman case, the north in China), and a traditionalist half in the east (Rome) and south (China). These processes of initial convergence and subsequent divergence in Eurasian state formation have never been the object of systematic comparative analysis. This volume, which brings together experts in the history of the ancient Mediterranean and early China, makes a first step in this direction, by presenting a series of comparative case studies on clearly defined aspects of state formation in early eastern and western Eurasia, focusing on the process of initial developmental convergence. It includes a general introduction that makes the case for a comparative approach; a broad sketch of the character of state formation in western and eastern Eurasia during the final millennium of antiquity; and six thematically connected case studies of particularly salient aspects of this process.

Download or read book The Rise of Western Christendom written by Peter Brown and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 741 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This tenth anniversary revised edition of the authoritative text on Christianity's first thousand years of history features a new preface, additional color images, and an updated bibliography. The essential general survey of medieval European Christendom, Brown's vivid prose charts the compelling and tumultuous rise of an institution that came to wield enormous religious and secular power. Clear and vivid history of Christianity's rise and its pivotal role in the making of Europe Written by the celebrated Princeton scholar who originated of the field of study known as 'late antiquity' Includes a fully updated bibliography and index

Download or read book Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late Antique Responses to the Arab Conquests is a showcase of new discoveries in an exciting and rapidly developing field: the study of the transition from Late Antiquity to Early Islam. The Arab conquests are shown to have changed both the Arabian conquerors and the conquered.

Download or read book The Dynamics of Ancient Empires written by Ian Morris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world's first known empires took shape in Mesopotamia between the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, beginning around 2350 BCE. The next 2,500 years witnessed sustained imperial growth, bringing a growing share of humanity under the control of ever-fewer states. Two thousand years ago, just four major powers--the Roman, Parthian, Kushan, and Han empires--ruled perhaps two-thirds of the earth's entire population. Yet despite empires' prominence in the early history of civilization, there have been surprisingly few attempts to study the dynamics of ancient empires in the western Old World comparatively. Such grand comparisons were popular in the eighteenth century, but scholars then had only Greek and Latin literature and the Hebrew Bible as evidence, and necessarily framed the problem in different, more limited, terms. Near Eastern texts, and knowledge of their languages, only appeared in large amounts in the later nineteenth century. Neither Karl Marx nor Max Weber could make much use of this material, and not until the 1920s were there enough archaeological data to make syntheses of early European and west Asian history possible. But one consequence of the increase in empirical knowledge was that twentieth-century scholars generally defined the disciplinary and geographical boundaries of their specialties more narrowly than their Enlightenment predecessors had done, shying away from large questions and cross-cultural comparisons. As a result, Greek and Roman empires have largely been studied in isolation from those of the Near East. This volume is designed to address these deficits and encourage dialogue across disciplinary boundaries by examining the fundamental features of the successive and partly overlapping imperial states that dominated much of the Near East and the Mediterranean in the first millennia BCE and CE. A substantial introductory discussion of recent thought on the mechanisms of imperial state formation prefaces the five newly commissioned case studies of the Neo-Assyrian, Achaemenid Persian, Athenian, Roman, and Byzantine empires. A final chapter draws on the findings of evolutionary psychology to improve our understanding of ultimate causation in imperial predation and exploitation in a wide range of historical systems from all over the globe. Contributors include John Haldon, Jack Goldstone, Peter Bedford, Josef Wiesehöfer, Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel, and Keith Hopkins, whose essay on Roman political economy was completed just before his death in 2004.