Series: Silk Roads

This masterful blend of history and urban storytelling brings to life the people and politics that shaped a single neighbourhood in a Manchurian city across several centuries. What can one neighbourhood reveal about the making of a modern nation? The Neighborhood deciphers the unexpected significance of Xita, a half-square-mile quarter in Shenyang, in Northeast China. As the historian Nianshen Song...

The first comprehensive history of the Ryukyu Islands region in English. The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and host over one and a half million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, sea-lanes and trade patterns have connected them to the East China Sea region, giving them a unique vantage point on the region's changes and...

Published in 1974, Marshall Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam was a watershed moment in the study of Islam. By locating the history of Islamic societies in a global perspective, Hodgson challenged the orientalist paradigms that had stunted the development of Islamic studies and provided an alternative approach to world history. Edited by Edmund Burke III and Robert Mankin, Islam and...