Category: Journal of World History

In the final issue of its 25th anniversary volume, the quarterly Journal of World History honors its founding editor, Jerry H. Bentley (1949-2012). Current editor Fabio López-Lázaro writes about Bentley,

Over the years, and with increasing focus, Bentley’s writing encouraged many to take up this “difficult work of actually investigating historical reality in the larger world.” But there was an implicit model as well (less often perceived) in the arc of his career, from his early methodological realizations to his final culminating recommendations for the future. We can learn from the way Bentley’s trajectory went from young historian of Renaissance humanism in the 1970s to early advocate of world history in the 1980s and then finally to mature proponent of world-historical research in the early 2000s, especially because this evolution parallels key developments in the recent history of the modern historical profession.

The issue specifically honors “Jerry’s dedication to the stewardship of the journal and his students’ careers.” The issue features the following articles by world history scholars, all students of Jerry H. Bentley.

• “Together They Might Make Trouble”: Cross-Cultural Interactions in Tang Dynasty Guangzhou, 618–907 c.e. by Adam C. Fong
• Beyond the World-System: A Buddhist Ecumene by Geok Yian Goh
• “With a Pretty Little Garden at the Back”: Domesticity and the Construction of “Civilized” Colonial Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Aotearoa/New Zealand by Erin Cozens
• Writing a World History of the Anglo-Gorkha Borderlands in the Early Nineteenth Century by Bernardo A. Michael
• Travel and Survival in the Colonial Malay World: Mobility, Region, and the World in Johor Elite Strategies, 1818–1914 by Keng We Koh
• Advertising Community: Union Times and Singapore’s Vernacular Public Sphere, 1906–1939 by David Kenley
• “One’s Molokai Can Be Anywhere”: Global Influence in the Twentieth-Century History of Hansen’s Disease by Kerri A. Inglis
• Review Essay: Jerry Bentley, World History, and the Decline of the “West” by John Pincince
• Book Reviews

Find the full text of the issue at Project MUSE

About the Journal

Devoted to historical analysis from a global point of view, the Journal of World History features a range of comparative and cross-cultural scholarship and encourages research on forces that work their influences across cultures and civilizations.

Subscriptions

Individual subscription is by membership in the World History Association. Institutional subscriptions available through UH Press.

Submissions

The Journal of World History is proud to introduce a new article and peer review submission system, accessible now at at jwh.msubmit.net.

Special Double Issue: Vol. 25, no. 2-3

ARTICLES

Forum: European Encounters with Islam in Asia

Encountering Islam in the Early Modern World
Matthew Lauzon, Matthew P. Romaniello, 195

When Filip Efremov recorded his extensive travel experiences throughout the Muslim world at the end of the eighteenth century, his descriptions of the people he encountered would have been familiar to many Western writers recording their experiences in India or Central Asia. Efremov represented the Enlightened West, observing the customs of Muslims with an “Orientalist” eye—noting their “weak and timid” demeanor, not to mention their “rough manners.”2 Two notes here might have struck another foreign observer as remarkable. First, the non-Muslim Indians are admirable, at least as a slight improvement in comparison to the Muslims. Second, the Muslims of India resembled the nomadic Turkmen, a group more familiar to the Russians. The implication, of course, was that Russia’s ability to control “its” Muslims could translate into the ability to control India’s Muslims, thus extending Russia’s borders quite far to the south.
Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 25, no.2- 3 (2014)”

ARTICLES

Changing Cosmology, Changing Perspectives on History and Politics: Christianity and Yang Tingyun’s 楊廷筠 (1562–1627) Reflections on China
Yu-Yin Cheng, 499

Yang Tingyun, one of the “three pillars of the early Catholic Church” in the late Ming period, has often been studied by scholars seeking to understand why he converted to Christianity and what Christian philosophy he embraced. This article shifts the focus to Yang’s secular concerns after his conversion. The article delves into the issues of Yang’s reassessment of Chinese history and political systems under the influences of Christianity and Western learning. It concludes that Yang’s Christian-centered interpretation of Chinese history and his aspirations for European-style institutions led him to question the importance of monarchy in China, with the result that he shifted his interest to the state, declaring an urgent need for pragmatic learning to strengthen state power. Citing the Jesuit fathers’ swift mastery of the Chinese classics and Western languages’ unlimited applications, Yang further became critical of the Sinocentric worldview of Chinese tradition.
Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 24, no. 3 (2013)”

ARTICLES

The Rise and Global Significance of the First “West”: The Medieval Islamic Maghrib
Fabio López Lázaro, 259

Evidence exists that the first historically verifiable use of the term “West” as a self-ascriptive political construct occurred in the medieval Almohad Muslim empire that united al-Andalus (Iberia) and North Africa in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Known as the Maghrib in Arabic, this hegemonic label served successfully as a strategic synecdoche for the Almohads’ ideological reformulation of their African-European society. While surrounding polities admired and imitated the Almohad West, its philosophical underpinnings created an intellectual revolution that threatened both Islamic and Christian elites and ultimately undermined Islamic toleration of Christian and Jewish subjects. Comprehending the Maghrib’s complex role in the creation of Western civilization clarifies the dialectical relationship of its two political heirs, modern Islamic North Africa and Christian Europe.

Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 24, no. 2 (2013)”

ARTICLES

Indian Spices and Roman “Magic” in Imperial and Late Antique Indomediterranea
Elizabeth Ann Pollard, 1

As Roman-Indian trade adjusted in Late Antiquity from its height in the first and second centuries C.E., Indian trade goods became associated with magic as real connections between Rome and their Indian point of origin faded. This article explores trade relations among Rome, India, and Meroitic Kush; literary evidence of magical amulets and spells, which imbue with magical powers substances that were available in the Mediterranean only through long-distance trade; and the Roman-Indian slave trade. Previous scholarship has emphasized the Persian and Egyptian influences on Greco-Roman magic; this article, however, demonstrates the Indian influence on magical concepts at Rome and the disconnect between long-distance economic exchange and popular ideas about goods traded.

Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 24, no. 1 (2013)”

ARTICLES

Visions of Juliana: A Portuguese Woman at the Court of the Mughals
Taymiya R. Zaman, 761

This article discusses Juliana Dias da Costa (d. 1734), an influential Portuguese woman at the court of the Mughal king Bahadur Shah I (d. 1712). Through an analysis of sources that traverse three centuries and several languages, this article demonstrates how visions of Juliana were shaped by the political aspirations of those writing about her. To Jesuits, Juliana was a proxy for their mission in India, and to the Portuguese, she was one of their own, strategically placed at court to serve their interests. And for her impoverished descendants in British India, she was emblematic of times when they held both power and prestige. Concluding with the author’s encounter with a descendant of Juliana’s in Pakistan, this article addresses questions of belonging that a figure such as Juliana raises today. Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 4 (2012)”

In Memorium: Jerry H. Bentley, vi

ARTICLES

The Global View of History in China
Liu Xincheng, 491

This is an attempt to trace and contextualize Chinese scholars’ response—either positive or negative—to the “West-imported” concept of a “global view of history” after its emergence in China more than two decades ago. It also introduces how world historians in China are consciously employing this “global view of history” to compile their own world history textbooks, a practice that gave rise to a serious concern about world history methodologies. Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 3 (2012)”

ARTICLES

Chordophone Culture in Two Early Modern Societies: A Pipa-Vihuela Duet
James A. Millward, 237

To make the case for more attention by world historians to music as a universal human phenomenon, this article compares the socioeconomic niches, cultural associations, and technical and technological development of plucked stringed instruments in sixteenth-century Spain and Ming China. An examination of the interrelationship of vihuela, lute, and guitarra, on the one hand, with the guqin and pipa, on the other, reveals similar patterns of gender, class, and ethno-national meaning becoming attached to these instruments. In particular, both vihuela and pipa changed morphologically, and playing style grew more virtuostic in tandem with the instruments’ rising popularity among urban classes in Spain and China. Moreover, the vihuela and likely the pipa as well were made from more exotic materials as their respective homelands became more engaged in global trade.
Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 2 (2012)”

SPECIAL ISSUE: GLOBAL CHINA

ARTICLES

Global China: Material Culture and Connections in World History
Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, 3

The multidisciplinary articles in this special issue were developed in conjunction with a research project on the cultures of porcelain in global history, hosted by the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick. These articles all situate porcelain within wider contexts of material and visual culture. This approach reveals the complexities of the processes involved in the appropriation of Chinese ceramics in England and Iran and in the diffusion of Chinese-style ceramics in the western Indian Ocean, and explores the ways in which ideas about Chineseness were formed, and a global visual culture on the theme of porcelain production emerged.

Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 23, no. 1 (2012)”

ARTICLES

“Sino-Pacifica”: Conceptualizing Greater Southeast Asia as a Sub-Arena of World History
Andrew J. Abalahin, 659

Conventional geography’s boundary line between a “Southeast Asia” and an “East Asia,” following a “civilizational” divide between a “Confucian” sphere and a “Vietnam aside, everything but Confucian” zone, obscures the essential unity of the two regions. This article argues the coherence of a macroregion “Sino-Pacifica” encompassing both and explores this new framework’s implications: the Yangzi River basin, rather than the Yellow River basin, pioneered the developments that led to the rise of Chinese civilization, and the eventual prominence of the Yellow River basin came not from centrality but rather from its liminality—its position as the contact zone between Inner Eurasia and Southeast Asia.

Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 22, no. 4 (2011)”

ARTICLES

The Spiritual Journey of an Independent Thinker: The Conversion of Li Zhizao to Catholicism
Yu Liu, 433

Li Zhizao (d. 1630) was one of the most famous early Chinese Roman Catholics intimately associated with Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), the founder of the Jesuit mission in China. In spite of his fame, Li’s religious experience has not so far been adequately investigated. To understand this crucially important aspect of his life and the related early modern East-West intellectual interaction, this article looks closely into questions about his conspicuously late formal entry into the Church, the peculiar circumstances of his agreement to receive baptism in 1610, and the complex implications of his logically deduced theistic belief for both Confucianism and Christianity. Continue reading “Journal of World History, vol. 22, no. 3 (2011)”