In the early modern world, the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires sprawled across a vast swath of the earth, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. The diverse and overlapping literate communities that flourished in these three empires left a lasting legacy on the political, religious, and cultural landscape of the Near East and India. Thi...(展开全部)

The prophet Muhammad and the early Islamic community radically redefined the concept of time that they had inherited from earlier religions' beliefs and practices. This new temporal system, based on a lunar calendar and era, was complex and required sophistication and accuracy. From the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, it was the Muslim astronomers of the Ottoman, Safavid and ...(展开全部)

In this deeply researched and revealing account, Robert Travers offers a new view of the transition from Mughal to British rule in India. By focusing on processes of petitioning and judicial inquiry, Travers argues that the East India Company consolidated its territorial power in the conquered province of Bengal by co-opting and transforming late Mughal, Persianate practices of...(展开全部)

For many years, Ottomanist historians have been accustomed to study the Ottoman Empire and/or its constituent regions as entities insulated from the outside world, except when it came to 'campaigns and conquests' on the one hand, and 'incorporation into the European-dominated world economy' on the other. However, now many scholars have come to accept that the Ottoman Empire was...(展开全部)

For many years, Ottomanist historians have been accustomed to study the Ottoman Empire and/or its constituent regions as entities insulated from the outside world, except when it came to 'campaigns and conquests' on the one hand, and 'incorporation into the European-dominated world economy' on the other. However, now many scholars have come to accept that the Ottoman Empire was...(展开全部)

The break-up of the Ottoman empire and the disintegration of the Russian empire were watershed events in modern history. The unravelling of these empires was both cause and consequence of World War I and resulted in the deaths of millions. It irrevocably changed the landscape of the Middle East and Eurasia and reverberates to this day in conflicts throughout the Caucasus and Mi...(展开全部)

How the Mongol invasions of the Near East reshaped the balance of world power in the Middle Ages For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region’s complex history. As The Mongol Storm reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol inva...(展开全部)

Even before the romanticized golden era of Shanghai in the 1930s, the famed Asian city was remarkable for its uniqueness and East-meets-West cosmopolitanism. Meng Yue analyzes a century-long shift of urbanity from China’s heartland to its shore. During the period between the decline of Jiangnan cities such as Suzhou and Yangzhou and Shanghai’s early twentieth-century rise, the ...(展开全部)