For a long time, silk, tea, sinocentrism, and eurocentrism made up a big patch of East Asian history. Simultaneously deviating from and complicating these tags, this edited volume reconstructs narratives from the periphery and considers marginal voices located beyond official archives as the centre of East Asian history. The lives of the Japanese Buddhist monks, Eastern Han local governors, Confucian scholars, Chinese coolies, Shanghainese tailors, Macau joss-stick makers, Hong Kong locals, a...

The proclamation of Jihad by the Sultan-Caliph in Constantinople, after the Ottoman Empire's entry into World War I, made the headlines. This book investigates the background and nature of the Ottoman Jihad proclamation in addition to its effects in the wider Middle East - both among the Arabs and the Turks, and among Sunni Muslims as well as Shi'ites. It brings to light the German hopes for and British fears of a worldwide uprising of Muslims in the colonial empires at that time. Moreover, i...

The Eighty Years War explores the military puzzle of the Dutch Republic. When a revolt broke out in the Low Countries against the rule of the King of Spain, no one could foresee that it would ultimately lead to the partition of the provinces.

Only the northern provinces succeeded in holding their own militarily. They formed an independent republic that was increasingly able to withstand the might of Spain. How did they do it? To answer that question this study examines the operations of the in...

The League against Imperialism explores the dramatic and engaging story of a global institution that brought together activists across geographical and political borders for the goal of eradicating colonial rule worldwide. The League against Imperialism (LAI) attracted anticolonial activists like India’s Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, as well as prominent figures like Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Romain Rolland, Upton Sinclair, Mohandas Gandhi, and M...

In 1667, the year of the Raid on the Medway, the Dutch Republic was at the pinnacle of its might and fame. A century and a half later little of this glory remained and Napoleon wiped the country off the political map. This book provides a military explanation for the ‘miracle’ of the seventeenth century and the demise that ensued. How were the army and navy in the Dutch Republic organised and financed? What tactics were employed and how did military leaders operate? Where did the Republic...

Fernand Deligny (1913-1996), ‘poet and ethologist’, is mostly known for his work with autistic children and for his influence on the revolutions in French post-war psychiatry. Though neither director nor a theorist of the image, cinema is constantly called into his social, pedagogical, and clinical experimentations. More interested in the processes of making, he distinguishes ‘camering’ from filming, thus emphasizing not the finished film but a ‘film to come’. This volume provides...

This book deals for the first time with the cultural history of media in nineteenth-century Iran, a history that deals with how modern techniques of representation and communication were received in the Iranian Shiʿa society. This reception history is examined in religious photography, military reforms, Persian passion plays, Shiʿa medicine, and the burgeoning telegraphic culture. The problematic relationship between Shīʿa Islam and 19th-century media is conceptualised and contextualised,...

Studying change in the course of human history, in different places, through the lens of a diverse set of core themes, World History for International Studies offers readers a set of windows into different debates historians have been conducting. Key themes, such as communication, trade, order, slavery, religion, war, identity, modernity, norms and ecology, are linked to specific world regions, which tell a story about how local ideas and individual contacts developed, started to overlap and ...

In 1884 an obscure British soldier, having finished his tour of duty in India, decided to make a detour on his trip home in order to spend three months crossing Persia unaccompanied except for the local muleteers. Among his accoutrements he packed a small leather-bound sketchbook in which he not only wrote a journal but in which he also added accomplished and charming water-colour illustrations. The authors' introduction contextualises this trip made in 1884 against the background of Persiana...

Islam exists in global history with its richly variegated cultural and social realities. When these specific cultural contexts are marginalized, Islam is reduced to an ahistorical religion without the ability to contribute to humanity. This limited understanding of Islam has been a contributing factor in many of the violent conflicts in the present day.

Reflecting on Islam in Indonesia, the world’s third largest democracy, supporting the largest Muslim population, Ahmad Syafii Maarif argues...