The Cambridge world history. Volume 5, Expanding webs of exchange and conflict, 500 CE-1500 CE

Volume 5 of the Cambridge World History series uncovers the cross-cultural exchange and conquest, and the accompanying growth of regional and trans-regional states, religions, and economic systems, during the period 500 to 1500 CE. The volume begins by outlining a series of core issues and processes across the world, including human relations with nature, gender and family, social hierarchies, education, and warfare. Further essays examine maritime and land-based networks of long-distance trade and migration in agricultural and nomadic societies, and the transmission and exchange of cultural forms, scientific knowledge, technologies, and text-based religious systems that accompanied these. The final section surveys the development of centralized regional states and empires in both the eastern and western hemispheres. Together these essays by an international team of leading authors show how processes furthering cultural, commercial, and political integration within and between various regions of the world made this millennium a 'proto-global' era. History Front Matter 1 Dedication 7 Contents 9 Figures 12 Maps 14 Table 15 Contributors 16 Preface 19 1 - Introduction 25 Part I - Global Developments 65 2 - Humans and the Environment 67 3 - Women, Family, Gender, and Sexuality 94 4 - Society 118 5 - Educational Institutions 140 6 - Warfare 169 Part II - Eurasian Commonalities 201 7 - Courtly Cultures 203 8 - The Age of Trans-regional Reorientations 230 Part III - Growing Interactions 255 9 - Trade and Commerce across Afro-Eurasia 257 10 - European and Mediterranean Trade Networks 281 11 - Trading Partners Across the Indian Ocean 311 12 - Technology and Innovation within Expanding Webs of Exchange 333 13 - The Transmission of Science and Philosophy 363 14 - Pastoral Nomadic Migrations and Conguets 383 Part IV - Expanding Religious Systems 407 15 - The Centrality of Islamic Civilization 409 16 - Christendom's Regional Systems 439 17 - The Spread of Buddhism 471 Part V - Sate Formations 505 18 - State Formation and Empire Building 507 19 - State Formation in China From the Sui Through the Song Dynasties 537 20 - The Mongol Empire and Inter-civilizational Exchange 558 21 - Byzantium 583 22 - Early Polities of the Western Sudan 610 23 - Mesoamerican State Formation in the Postclassic Period 634 24 - State and Religion in the Inca Empire 662 25 - "Proto-globalization" and "Proto-glocalizations" in the Middle Millennium 689 Index 709 "Volume 5 of the Cambridge World History series uncovers the cross-cultural exchange and conquest, and the accompanying growth of regional and trans-regional states, religions, and economic systems, during the period 500 to 1500. The volume begins by outlining a series of core issues and processes across the world, including human relations with nature, gender and family, social hierarchies, education, and warfare. Further essays examine maritime and land-based networks of long-distance trade and migration in agricultural and nomadic societies, and the transmission and exchange of cultural forms, scientific knowledge, technologies, and text-based religious systems that accompanied these. The final section surveys the development of centralized regional states and empires in both the eastern and western hemispheres. Together these essays by an international team of leading authors show how processes furthering cultural, commercial, and political integration within and between various regions of the world made this millennium a 'proto-global' era."--Publisher "The Cambridge World History is an authoritative new overview of the dynamic field of world history. It covers the whole of human history, not simply history since the development of written records, in an expanded time frame that represents the latest thinking in world and global history. With over two hundred essays, it is the most comprehensive account yet of the human past, and it draws on a broad international pool of leading academics from a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Reflecting the increasing awareness that world history can be examined through many different approaches and at varying geographic and chronological scales, each volume offers regional, topical, and comparative essays alongside case studies that provide depth of coverage to go with the breadth of vision that is the distinguishing characteristic of world history."--Publisher