Books in the Studies in Comparative World History series

A new edition of Philip Curtin's classic work on the history of the plantations.

This book charts the convergence of science, culture, and politics across Portugal's empire, showing how a global geographical concept was born. In accessible, narrative prose, this book explores the unexpected forms that science took in the early modern world. It highlights little-known linkages between Asia and the Atlantic world.

Lieberman argues that over a thousand years, each of mainland Southeast Asia's great lowland corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration punctuated by recurrent collapse. These trajectories were synchronized not only between corridors but, most curiously, between the mainland as a whole, much of Europe, and other sectors of Eurasia.

This book seeks both to integrate Southeast Asia into world history and to rethink much of Eurasia's premodern past. It argues that Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, China, and South Asia all embodied idiosyncratic versions of a hitherto unrecognized pattern of political and cultural integration that was governed by Eurasian-wide climatic, commercial, and military stimuli.

Is the history of the modern world the history of Europe? Or is it possible to situate the history of modernity as a world historical process apart from its origins? This text challenges adherents of Eurocentrism and multiculturalism to rethink the roles of Europe and Islamic civilisation in world history.

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences, economic, political, and cultural, of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World.

Advances an interesting perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics, it uses case studies to trace a shift from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial world.

This examination of the Dutch East India Company grapples with the theoretical nature of empire, examines how empires exist through the movement and control of people within their realms, and proposes a new concept of diaspora, demonstrating how all empires have unique networks of free and forced migration.

In this book, Ulbe Bosma details how the British and Dutch introduced the sugar plantation model in Asia around 1800, when abolitionist campaigns in the Caribbean began, and refashioned it over time. Previously, European markets had almost exclusively relied on Caribbean sugar produced by slave labor.

This anthology charts the different contexts in which luxury objects have been used across the globe, ranging from the social practices linked to these objects to their production, exchange, and consumption. Using luxury goods as a conduit, Luxury in Global Perspective enriches our understanding of global history.

Global Gifts examines the ways in which material goods contributed to the growth of political exchanges between Asia, Africa and Europe, and specifically how those exchanges influenced the global production and circulation of art and material culture before 1800.

Global Gifts examines the ways in which material goods contributed to the growth of political exchanges between Asia, Africa and Europe, and specifically how those exchanges influenced the global production and circulation of art and material culture before 1800.