ENTANGLED WORLDS

How the world began to be connected.

This sizable book is the last of Harvard’s massive six-volume History of the World that largely eschews politics, war, and technology to emphasize global connectivity. Aimed at an educated readership, the work concentrates on the movement of people, goods, religions, and ideas during a premodern era in a world that, if not united, was certainly “entangled.” Editor König, professor at the University of Konstanz, contributes one of the book’s six regional chapters, “The Emergence of an Islamic Commonwealth.” The chapter delivers perhaps more than readers want to know about Islamic doctrines, sects, governance, and legal systems, but clearly outlines Muslim expansion; fascinatingly, he notes, for instance, that “abundant evidence proves that Muslim diaspora groups and specific Islamic regional cultures had developed on the Malabar coast and in southern Chinese port cities. The architectural style of mosques in the region bears witness both to the cultural integration and the maritime networking of these Muslim groups.” During this period, the Americas were almost but not entirely isolated from other continents but thrived in the centuries before the catastrophic arrival of Europeans. Despite distance, jungles, absence of pack animals and the wheel, people filled both continents and did not lose touch. Although careful to avoid the conventional preoccupation with Europe, the book’s Eastern Eurasia chapter’s author deplores focusing on medieval China, admittedly the world’s largest, most prosperous empire during this period, preferring to treat it as a single region, with “Sinitic” languages, political relationships, and Mahāyāna Buddhism in common. This volume and series should not be anyone’s introduction to world history, but learned readers as well as scholars will find an insightful exploration of the era leading to today’s more or less global culture by authors who mostly avoid the traditional turgid academic prose.

A deep historical inquiry into the background of the modern world.