Empires And Encounters

"Empires and Encounters presents information on different aspects of human life in all parts of the world from the period 1350 to 1750. In the first centuries of that period people of different parts of the world were not only culturally different but also knew little or even nothing of each other. The Incas for instance had no idea of the existence of Europeans or Africans and vice versa. Inside large regions of the world, however, political interaction, as well as economic and cultural exchange, had been going on for many centuries and was during this period increasing in intensity because this was a time of worldwide empire-building. The chapters of the book examine Eurasia between Japan and Russia; the Ottoman and Iranian Empires of the Muslim world; Mughal India and the trading world of the Indian Ocean; the multicolored world of maritime Southeast Asia and Oceania; and the continents on both sides of the Atlantic under the growing impact of Europe. Europe at this time had no privileged power position, but it did enjoy a special role in establishing regular maritime interaction across the Atlantic and worldwide between the five macro-regions of the globe. The European world economy, based upon the silver of Spanish America, initiated modern globalization"--Provided by publisher.

Between 1350 and 1750 the world reached a tipping point of global connectedness. In this volume of the acclaimed series A History of the World, noted international scholars examine five critical geographical areas where exploration and empire building led to expanding interaction--early signals on every continent of a shrinking globe.

Religion and empire were inseparable forces in the early modern Atlantic world. Religious passions and conflicts drove much of the expansionist energy of post-Reformation Europe, providing both a rationale and a practical mode of organizing the dispersal and resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people from the Old World to the New World. Exhortations to conquer new peoples were the lingua franca of Western imperialism, and men like the mystically inclined Christopher Columbus were genuinely inspired to risk their lives and their fortunes to bring the gospel to the Americas. And in the thousands of religious refugees seeking asylum from the vicious wars of religion that tore the continent apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these visionary explorers found a ready pool of migrants—English Puritans and Quakers, French Huguenots, German Moravians, Scots-Irish Presbyterians—equally willing to risk life and limb for a chance to worship God in their own way. Focusing on the formative period of European exploration, settlement, and conquest in the Americas, from roughly 1500 to 1760, Empires of God brings together historians and literary scholars of the English, French, and Spanish Americas around a common set of questions: How did religious communities and beliefs create empires, and how did imperial structures transform New World religions? How did Europeans and Native Americans make sense of each other's spiritual systems, and what acts of linguistic and cultural transition did this entail? What was the role of violence in New World religious encounters? Together, the essays collected here demonstrate the power of religious ideas and narratives to create kingdoms both imagined and real.

English summary: European Empires with their multi-ethnic societies have long been considered as failures, and their history was often presented as a narrative of mere disintegration and decay. With the ever dominating subject of nation-state formation receding, a new scope for considering empires as the much longer and pervasive alternative in European history opens up. Against this background, this volume contributes to a more systematic comparison of the ambivalent and changing relationships between centre and periphery, between colonizers and colonized in the British Empire, the Habsburg Monarchy, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The spectrum of such relationships reaches from infrastructures and political conflicts to the practice of monarchy and religion and war experiences. A mere addition of case-studies is avoided by inter-relating the contributions on the basis of comparative comments by leading specialists in the respective fields. German text. German description: Europas Grossreiche waren gepragt von ethnischer Differenz und raumlicher Vielfalt. Gerade diese Pluralitat galt lange als Ursache fur Scheitern und Zerfall. Empires pragten die Geschichte Europas jedoch viel langer und starker als die jungen Nationalstaaten, die unsere Vorstellung von Europa bis heute bestimmen. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes vergleichen systematisch vier europaische Empires im 19. und fruhen 20. Jahrhundert: das Britische Empire, die Habsburgermonarchie, Russland und das Osmanische Reich. Wie spannungsreich die Beziehungen zwischen Zentrum und Peripherie sowie zwischen Herrschern und Beherrschten waren, wird am Beispiel von Infrastrukturen, Konflikten und Kriegserfahrungen ebenso deutlich wie anhand der Praxis von Monarchie und Religion.

This collection will explore the myriad encounters which have taken place between Iranians and Russian in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will include some discussion of diplomacy and foreign policy but a central objective of the collection will be to widen the scholarly perspective to incorporate an understanding of other types of encounter, whether political, economic, social, cultural, or intellectual, and both friendly and hostile, especially as these developed beyond the official and elite levels. In particular it will attempt to understand the complexities of the impact on Iran of the Russian presence on its northern borders: the very expansion of Tsarist empire during the nineteenth century threatening Iran's independence yet bringing ideas of social-democracy to its doorstep, the Soviet Union in the twentieth century similarly contradictory in its effect, sustaining radical Iranian politics while advancing its own strategic interests.

When encountering unfamiliar environments in India and the Philippines, the British and the Americans wrote extensively about the first taste of mango and meat spiced with cumin, the smell of excrement and coconut oil, the feel of humidity and rough cloth against skin, the sound of bells and insects, and the appearance of dark-skinned natives and lepers. So too did the colonial subjects they encountered perceive the agents of empire through their senses and their skins. Empire of course involved economics, geopolitics, violence, a desire for order and greatness, a craving for excitement and adventure. It also involved an encounter between authorities and subjects, an everyday process of social interaction, political negotiation, policing, schooling, and healing. While these all concerned what people thought about each other, perceptions of others, as Andrew Rotter shows, were also formed through seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. In this book, Rotter offers a sensory history of the British in India from the formal imposition of their rule to its end (1857-1947) and the Americans in the Philippines from annexation to independence (1898-1946). The British and the Americans saw themselves as the civilizers of what they judged backward societies, and they believed that a vital part of the civilizing process was to properly prioritize the senses and to ensure them against offense or affront. Societies that looked shabby, were noisy and smelly, felt wrong, and consumed unwholesome food in unmannerly ways were unfit for self-government. It was the duty of allegedly more sensorily advanced Anglo-Americans to educate them before formally withdrawing their power. Indians and Filipinos had different ideas of what constituted sensory civilization and to some extent resisted imperial efforts to impose their own versions. What eventually emerged were compromises between these nations' sensory regimes. A fascinating and original comparative work, Empires of the Senses offers new perspectives on imperial history.

Essays that suggest new ways of understanding the role that US actors and agencies have played in Latin America." - publisher.