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...

Traces the rise and fall of a set of modern disciplinary fields devoted to premodern historical contact that drew on intellectual currents across and beyond China and Europe. In The Silk Road Idea, Tamara T. Chin examines the rise of interest in "the connected past" and its impact on key disciplines, focusing on the period from 1870 to 1970. Against...

A richly illustrated tapestry of interwoven studies spanning some six thousand years of history, Dæmons Are Forever is at once a record of archaic contacts and transactions between humans and protean spirit beings—dæmons—and an account of exchanges, among human populations, of the science of spirit beings: dæmonology. Since the time of the Indo-European migrations, and especially following the opening of...