Download or read book Oceania 800 1800CE written by James L. Flexner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-23 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over a span of 1000 years beginning around 800CE, the people of the Pacific Islands undertook a remarkable period of voyaging, political evolution, and cross-cultural interactions. Polynesian navigators encountered previously uninhabited lands, as well as already inhabited islands and the coast of the Americas. Island societies saw epic sagas of political competition and intrigue, documented through oral traditions and the monuments and artefacts recovered through archaeology. European entry into the region added a new episode of interaction with strange people from over the horizon. These histories provide an important cross-cultural perspective for the concept of 'the Middle Ages' from outside of the usual Old World focus.
Download or read book Swahili Worlds in Globalism written by Chapurukha M. Kusimba and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Element discusses a medieval African urban society as a product of interactions among African communities who inhabited the region between 100 BCE and 500 CE. It deviates from standard approaches that credit urbanism and state in Africa to non-African agents. East Africa, then and now, was part of the broader world of the Indian Ocean. Globalism coincided with the political and economic transformations that occurred during the Tang-Sung-Yuan-Ming and Islamic Dynastic times, 600-1500 CE. Positioned as the gateway into and out of eastern Africa, the Swahili coast became a site through which people, inventions, and innovations bi-directionally migrated, were adopted, and evolved. Swahili peoples' agency and unique characteristics cannot be seen only through Islam's prism. Instead, their unique character is a consequence of social and economic interactions of actors along the coast, inland, and beyond the Indian Ocean.
Download or read book Southeast Asian Interconnections written by Derek Heng and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the late first millennium CE, Maritime Southeast Asia has been an inter-connected zone, with its societies and states maintaining economic and diplomatic relations with both China and Japan on the east, and the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East on the west. This global connectedness was facilitated by merchant and shipping networks that originated from within and outside Southeast Asia, resulting in a trans-regional economy developing by the early second millennium CE. Sojourning populations began to appear in Maritime Southeast Asia, culminating in records of Chinese and Indian settlers in such places as Sumatra, Malay Peninsula and the Gulf of Siam by the mid-first millennium CE. At the same time, information of products that were harvested in Southeast Asia began to be appropriated by pockets of society in China, the India and the Middle East, resulting in the production of new knowledge and usages for these products in these markets.
Download or read book Late Tang China and the World 750 907 CE written by Shao-yun Yang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-25 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the Tang dynasty (618-907) has acquired a reputation as the most 'cosmopolitan' period in Chinese history. The standard narrative also claims that this cosmopolitan openness faded after the An Lushan Rebellion of 755-763, to be replaced by xenophobic hostility toward all things foreign. This Element reassesses the cosmopolitanism-to-xenophobia narrative and presents a more empirically-grounded and nuanced interpretation of the Tang empire's foreign relations after 755.
Download or read book The Chertsey Tiles the Crusades and Global Textile Motifs written by Amanda Luyster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-31 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While visual cultures mingled comfortably along the silk roads and on the shores of the Mediterranean, medieval England has sometimes been viewed – by both medieval and more recent writers – as isolated. In this Element the author introduces new evidence to show that this understanding of medieval England's visual relationship to the rest of the world demands revision. An international team led by the author has completed a digital reconstruction of the so-called Chertsey combat tiles (sophisticated pictorial floor tiles made c. 1250, England), including both images and lost Latin texts. Grounded in the discoveries made while completing this reconstruction, the author proposes new conclusions regarding the historical circumstances within which the Chertsey tiles were commissioned and their significant connections with global textile traditions.
Download or read book Ethiopia and the World 330 1500 CE written by Yonatan Binyam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Cambridge Element offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the histories of the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands from late antiquity to the late medieval period, updating traditional Western academic perspectives. Early scholarship, often by philologists and religious scholars, upheld 'Ethiopia' as an isolated repository of ancient Jewish and Christian texts. This work reframes the region's history, highlighting the political, economic, and cultural interconnections of different kingdoms, polities, and peoples. Utilizing recent advancements in Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies as well as Medieval Studies, it reevaluates key instances of contact between 'Ethiopia' and the world of Afro-Eurasia, situating the histories of the Christian, Muslim, and local-religious or 'pagan' groups living in the Red Sea littoral and the Eritrean-Ethiopian highlands in the context of the Global Middle Ages.
Download or read book Slavery in East Asia written by Don J. Wyatt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-05 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In premodern China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, just as in the far less culturally cohesive countries composing the West of the Middle Ages, enslavement was an assumed condition of servitude warranting little examination, as the power and profits it afforded to the slaver made it a convention pursued unreflectively. Slavery in medieval East Asia shared with the West the commonplace assumption that nearly all humans were potential chattel, that once they had become owned beings, they could then be either sold or inherited. Yet, despite being representative of perhaps the most universalizable human practice of that age, slavery in medieval East Asia was also endowed with its own distinctive traits and traditions. Our awareness of these features of distinction contributes immeasurably to a more nuanced understanding of slavery as the ubiquitous and openly practiced institution that it once was and the now illicit and surreptitious one that it intractably remains.
Download or read book Medieval Textiles across Eurasia c 300 1400 written by Patricia Blessing and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-31 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study considers the textiles made, traded, and exchanged across Eurasia from late antiquity to the late Middle Ages with special attention to the socio-political and cultural aspects of this universal medium. It presents a wide range of textiles used in both domestic and religious settings, as dress and furnishings, and for elite and ordinary owners. The introduction presents historiographical background to the study of textiles and explains the conditions of their survival in archaeological contexts and museums. A section on the materials and techniques used to produce textiles if followed by those outlining textile production, industry, and trade across Eurasia. Further sections examine the uses for dress and furnishing textiles and the appearance of imported fabrics in European contexts, addressing textiles' functions and uses in medieval societies. Lastly, a concluding section on textile aesthetics connects fabrics to their broader visual and material context.
Download or read book Early Tang China and the World 618 750 CE written by Shao-yun Yang and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-30 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For about half a century, the Tang dynasty has held a reputation as the most 'cosmopolitan' period in Chinese history, marked by unsurpassed openness to foreign peoples and cultures and active promotion of international trade. Heavily influenced by Western liberal ideals and contemporary China's own self-fashioning efforts, this glamorous image of the Tang calls for some critical reexamination. This Element presents a broad and revisionist analysis of early Tang China's relations with the rest of the Eurasian world and argues that idealizing the Tang as exceptionally “cosmopolitan” limits our ability to think both critically and globally about its actions and policies as an empire.
Download or read book The Prehistory of Rapa Nui Easter Island written by Valentí Rull and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-07-11 with total page 623 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the main enigmas of Easter Island’s (Rapa Nui, in the Polynesian language) prehistory from the time of initial settlement to European contact with a multidisciplinary perspective. The main topics include: (i) the time of first settlement and the origin of the first settlers; (ii) the main features of prehistoric Rapanui culture and their changes; (iii) the deforestation of the island and its timing and causes; (iv) the extinction of the indigenous biota, (v) the occurrence of climatic shifts and their potential effects on socioecological trends; (vi) the evidence for a cultural and demographic collapse before European contact; and (vii) the influence of Europeans on prehistoric Rapanui society. The book is subdivided into thematic sections and each chapter is written by renowned specialists in disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology, paleoecology, ethnography, linguistics, ethnobotany, phylogenetics/phylogeography and history. Contributors have been invited to provide an open and objective vision that includes as many views as possible on the topics considered. In this way, the readers may be able to compare different of points of view and make their own interpretations on each of the subjects considered. The book is intended for a wide audience including graduate students, advanced undergraduate students, university teachers and researchers interested in the subject. Given its multidisciplinary character and the topics included, the book is suitable for students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines and interests.
Download or read book Andre Gunder Frank and Global Development written by Patrick Manning and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing previously unpublished material, a review of the legacy and work of Andre Gunder Frank
Download or read book The Coming of the Maori written by Peter Buck (The Rangi Hiroa.) and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book China the Belt and Road Initiative and the Century of Great Migration written by Michele Bruni and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-04-13 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book argues whether future migrations will be organized by destination countries or by criminal organizations; whether migrants will travel in a humane way or will continue to die along the road; whether properly trained migrants will boost the productivity of arrival countries or these countries will continue to squander money to build useless walls, possibly far from their border, and pay neighbours, not certainly in the top list from the human right perspective, to keep workers they need in concentration camps. It suggests that it is in the interest of more developed countries to stop denying their structural shortage of labour and start co-managing with one or more potential departure countries migration flows coherent with the quantitative and qualitative needs of their labour market. Economic fairness and sound economic thinking would also require destination countries to finance the training of potential migrants in the country of departure: in substance to build schools and vocational centres not walls. China represents an ideal case study in this regard not only because of its history, institutional setting, and international relationships but because in the next decades it will be the country most affected by the largest shortage of labour.
Download or read book Ten Thousand Years of Inequality written by Timothy A. Kohler and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Field-defining research that will set the standard for understanding inequality in archaeological contexts"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Theory in the Pacific the Pacific in Theory written by Tim Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-07-27 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theory in the Pacific, the Pacific in Theory explores the role of theory in Pacific archaeology and its interplay with archaeological theory worldwide. The contributors assess how the practice of archaeology in Pacific contexts has led to particular types of theoretical enquiry and interest, and, more broadly, how the Pacific is conceptualised in the archaeological imagination. Long seen as a laboratory environment for the testing and refinement of social theory, the Pacific islands occupy a central place in global theoretical discourse. This volume highlights this role through an exploration of how Pacific models and exemplars have shaped, and continue to shape, approaches to the archaeological past. The authors evaluate key theoretical perspectives and explore current and future directions in Pacific archaeology. In doing so, attention is paid to the influence of Pacific people and environments in motivating and shaping theory-building. Theory in the Pacific, the Pacific in Theory makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how theory develops attuned to the affordances and needs of specific contexts, and how those contexts promote reformulation and development of theory elsewhere. It will be fascinating to scholars and archaeologists interested in the Pacific region, as well as students of wider archaeological theory.
Download or read book The Mesoamerican Ballgame written by Vernon L. Scarborough and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Precolumbian ballgame, played on a masonry court, has long intrigued scholars because of the magnificence of its archaeological remains. From its lowland Maya origins it spread throughout the Aztec empire, where the game was so popular that sixteen thousand rubber balls were imported annually into Tenochtitlan. It endured for two thousand years, spreading as far as to what is now southern Arizona. This new collection of essays brings together research from field archaeology, mythology, and Maya hieroglyphic studies to illuminate this important yet puzzling aspect of Native American culture. The authors demonstrate that the game was more than a spectator sport; serving social, political, mythological, and cosmological functions, it celebrated both fertility and the afterlife, war and peace, and became an evolving institution functioning in part to resolve conflict within and between groups. The contributors provide complete coverage of the archaeological, sociopolitical, iconographic, and ideological aspects of the game, and offer new information on the distribution of ballcourts, new interpretations of mural art, and newly perceived relations of the game with material in the Popol Vuh. With its scholarly attention to a subject that will fascinate even general readers, The Mesoamerican Ballgame is a major contribution to the study of the mental life and outlook of New World peoples.
Download or read book The World written by Felipe Fernández-Armesto and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 2008 with total page 868 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The World: A Brief World History, Volume II.
