Entangled Worlds: 600–1350

One of the most significant developments in the field of medieval history of late has been the rise of various approaches to a “global middle ages.” For established scholars, even if one is amenable to it, this represents a significant reorientation of one’s relationship to one’s field. For graduate students, and those responsible for training them, the question of how best to prepare a new scholar to operate in this way is a daunting one for myriad reasons. Many of the challenges of thinking about a global middle ages or, as rightly suggested here, a global premodernity, are captured by this impressive volume, which includes sections on the Americas, the Dar al-Islam or “Islamic Commonwealth,” Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Each of these sections presents a distinct set of problems for the historian, for example, the absence of textual sources or the presence of textual sources with significant blind spots; established frameworks or narratives marked by nationalisms, eurocentrism, or other problems; a bewildering degree of environmental, social, and political diversity; geographies that straddle multiple zones of traditional historical expertise; and local or regional histories that are not well contained by the volume’s already lengthy chronological parameters. Daniel König’s introduction suggests that the unifying factor here is “the emergence and intensification of a number of transregional high-density flows that contributed to the rise of new—and the stabilization of preexisting, albeit occasionally imperiled—systems of Afropean, Afrasian, Eurasian, and intra-American exchange, affecting the lives of millions of people on all social levels, from rulers to slaves.” (3) He further argues that the contents of the various sections are comparable because they all “trace how multipolar and highly distinct macroregions with shifting boundaries arrived at lower or higher degrees of internal integration between 600 and 1350.” (14) The key difference between this era and later periods, we are told, is that however densely various parts of this world were entangled with one another, there always remained regions of significant size that were barely linked with others, perhaps even totally cut off.With a work of this magnitude, it is hard to say where best to begin with an evaluation, so I will start by saying what I think this book is and is not. It is a remarkable assemblage of studies that provides a detailed glimpse at a wide variety of fields, with notes, bibliography, and an index rich enough to make it a very useful tool for scholars and educators. It is not, however, necessarily friendly to the newcomer (and for any potential reader, large swaths of the book will be foreign territory) or to undergraduates. I learned a tremendous amount reading this book, as most historians will, but I was not always sure of just how typical or atypical the approach to a given field was. The sections vary in approach (often necessarily so) and in length. Some could have been books all on their own, while others are shorter and perhaps a bit more idiosyncratic. Given the stresses and limitations on academic publishing in our day, it is remarkable that a tome of this prodigious size was published at all. Whether it does “justice to the different perspectives on history cherished and developed in various historiographical traditions and collective memories across the globe” (27) is a complex question. Indeed, one wonders if any single volume could attain that admirable goal.I read this book as a historian of medieval Europe whose interests are most focused on Italy and the Mediterranean world. As such, the European section was the most familiar, along with some of the material on the Muslim world, while my lack of knowledge relating to the section on Africa felt, in many ways, the most urgent. Michael Borgolte’s section on “the continentalization of Europe” focuses primarily on mobility, noting that Europeans faced relatively little pressure from outside during this era, and so generated ideals of unity and universality, but also became increasingly fragmented, as one Christendom broke into several. We see the rise of various types of moving agents, traveling across equally various networks, from religious to commercial, in a world that is ever more densely interconnected with an internal infrastructure of roads, rivers, and other routes that takes on a capillary character and leaves less and less of Europe truly isolated. König’s contribution tracks the emergence of a notional Islamic commonwealth, and of the unevenly realized “connecting standards” that linked it and left their mark upon it as it began to fragment during the Abbasid period. It is an impressive contribution that had me constantly noting where I would need to revise courses that touched on its material. François-Xavier Fauvelle’s section on Sub-Saharan Africa is exemplary in its thoughtful and deeply historical approach. Eschewing any temptation to reduce the natural complexity of his topic, while also attending to the fact that privileging complexity suggests a kind of evolutionary approach to history, Fauvelle opts to emphasize the interactions between human beings and their environments in specific regions, how those interactions then shaped transregional communication of various sorts, and how each region maintained a high degree of agency in navigating and shaping that communication. One comes away not only with a very solid sense of how to think about Sub-Saharan Africa in relation other regions, but with a welcome reminder of what truly thoughtful, intentional work by a historian should look like.Some sections of this book I simply feel unequipped to fully evaluate. The book opens with a section on the Americas coauthored by three anthropologists, Christopher S. Beekman, Justin Jennings, and Michael D. Mathiowetz. The section is oriented around several distinct models, network connectivity (interaction and transfer of goods, etc.) and entanglement (a more thoroughgoing relationship productive of shared trajectories) that characterized different parts of the Americas at different times. It is a tremendously interesting chapter, but one that stands apart from the rest of the book, both in terms of limited contact with the rest of the globe and approach. The book closes with Naomi Standen’s section on eastern Eurasia, which presents a polycentric world, powerfully marked by the varieties and networks of Buddhism, by political systems characterized by conditional leadership and practices of followership, and by common language. Standen’s decision to deliberately avoid tidy narratives in many ways echoes Fauvelle’s and is similarly admirable. But even the nonspecialist reader arrives knowing that there is a rich array of evidence available for the study of this field, and may leave uncertain of precisely how and to what extent her deliberately disorienting approach to the region (eliminating almost any marker of the familiar for the outsider) maps onto what others might have to say on the matter. I found the material fascinating, but unsure myself of how I might use it. André Wink’s relatively short section on “Medieval India” left me deeply aware of how little I know about the subject, but also unsure if the chapter had really provided me with the apparatus needed to gain some purchase on it. It is the briefest section, yet ranges chronologically and geographically to a tremendous extent, and is the only chapter to explicitly evoke the “medieval” in its self-presentation. Perhaps due to these things, it feels somewhat out of sync with the rest of the volume.Inevitably, readers will at times be frustrated by what they find here, especially when navigating chapters on unfamiliar material. Borgolte’s chapter sometimes jumps around chronologically in ways that a Europeanist might manage but that will be disorienting to the non-specialist. The reader that turns to Wink’s contribution for information on South or Southeast Asia will find the latter only lightly touched upon, and the former often explained via detailed discussions of events in Anatolia. There are reasons for this, perhaps even good ones, but the newcomer unfamiliar with Wink’s work will be confused. Writing collectively a single chapter on the entirety of the Americas (an astonishing undertaking, it seems to me), Beekman, Jennings, and Mathiowetz provide a revelatory piece of work showing what scholars of premodernity can do, largely via archaeology, in places where textual evidence is scant or absent. Yet, the lack of consistency in approach between the chapters of this volume leaves the reader wondering how this impressive work on the Americas might be thought about vis-à-vis the other sections. This is a book about global premodernity, not “the Middle Ages,” so including the Americas makes sense, but one feels they needed more room, and one feels the acknowledged absence of the Pacific world and of Australia.Of course, it feels perverse to ask for more when confronted with a book of this size. But this reader could not help but think that this might have worked better as a book series. Many of its sections are, indeed, of monograph length on their own. Perhaps to really work as a single volume, more attention needed to be given to ensuring that the various parts of the book would work well in relation to one another. But I remain uncertain whether a single volume of this sort was the best way to try and do the job this book sets out to do.I came away from the book knowing a great many things I did not know before, with a great many ideas about ways to teach global premodernity, and with more enthusiasm than ever about doing so. So, it is fair to say that the volume repaid my attention to it well, and I have no doubt that I will return to it often with questions. But I also came away more convinced than ever that, if the study of history, and especially premodern history, is going to move in global directions, then how historical scholarship is done will need to change. No one scholar could ever get his or her head around this world or amass more than a fraction of the technical skills needed to do good research relating to it. Collective efforts are required, and that means both a significant reorganization of scholarly and educational infrastructure as well as important changes to how scholarly work is carried out, evaluated, and rewarded. In sum, this book shows us not only how complex and challenging thinking about a global premodernity is, but how important it is to do so well, while also signaling clearly the challenges of that task, which go well beyond the considerable challenges of producing an impressive volume like this one.