Asia Inside Out reveals the dynamic forces that have historically linked regions of the world’s largest continent, stretching from Japan and Korea to the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Middle East. Connected Places, the second installment in this pioneering three-volume survey, highlights the transregional flows of goods, ideas, and people across natural and political boundaries—sea routes, delta ecologies, and mountain passes, ports and oasis towns, imperial capitals and postmodern cities. It challenges the conventional idea that defines geopolitical regions as land-based, state-centered, and possessing linear histories.

Exploring themes of maritime connections, mobile landscapes, and spatial movements, the authors examine significant sites of linkage and disjuncture from the early modern period to the present. Readers discover how eighteenth-century pirates shaped the interregional networks of Vietnam’s Tonkin Gulf, how Kashmiri merchants provided intelligence of remote Himalayan territories to competing empires, and how for centuries a vibrant trade in horses and elephants fueled the Indian Ocean economy. Other topics investigated include cultural formations in the Pearl River delta, global trade in Chittagong’s transformation, gendered homemaking among mobile Samurai families, border zones in Qing China and contemporary Burma, colonial spaces linking India and Mesopotamia, transnational marriages in Oman’s immigrant populations, new cultural spaces in Korean pop, and the unexpected adoption of the Latin script by ethnically Chinese Muslims in Central Asia.

Connected Places shows the constant fluctuations over many centuries in the making of Asian territories and illustrates the confluence of factors in the historical construction of place and space.

This dazzling book takes us on a voyage of discovery around the world at the turn of the last millennium, when for the first time the world was in essence a unity. Islam bridged Eurasia, western Europe, and North Africa. Vikings, with links to Scandinavia and Russia, had just arrived in North America. These and other peoples reached out to create links and put isolated cultures unwittingly in touch. John Man vividly captures these epochal events, and depicts the colorful peoples that defined the world’s mix of stability and change, of isolation and contact. In an immensely learned portrayal, he traces enduring cultural strands that became part of the world as we know it today.

In text, maps, and pictures, most in color, and drawing on the expertise of two dozen consultants, John Man has created a concise compendium of all the major cultures of the lost millennial world of 1000. In some cultures—Europe, Islam, China, and Japan—written records contain a vast range of materials, often revealing sharply focused details of life and personality. Here lie startling contrasts with today’s world, and even foreshadowing of the future that are equally astonishing in their familiarity. For nonliterate cultures—in the United States, Southeast Asia, Polynesia, Africa—this book draws on a wealth of archeological research, some of it made available to nonspecialists for the first time.

The dramatic story of Christianity from its origins to the present day, told through more than one hundred stunning color maps.

With over two billion practicing believers today, Christianity has taken root in almost all parts of the globe. Its impact on Europe and the Americas in particular has been fundamental. Through more than one hundred beautiful color maps and illustrations, Christianity traces the history of the religion, beginning with the world of Jesus Christ. From the consolidation of the first Christian empire—Constantine’s Rome—to the early Christian states that thrived in Ireland, Ethiopia, and other regions of the Roman periphery, Christianity quickly proved dynamic and adaptable.

After centuries of dissemination, strife, dogmatic division, and warfare in its European and Near Eastern heartland, Christianity conquered new worlds. In North America, immigrants fleeing persecution and intolerance rejected the established Church, and in time revivalist religions flourished and spread. Missionaries took the Christian message to Latin America, Africa, and Asia, bringing millions of new converts into the fold.

Christianity has served as the inspiration for some of the world’s finest monuments, literature, art, and architecture, while also playing a major role in world politics and history, including conquest, colonization, conflict, and liberation. Despite challenges in the modern world from atheism and secularism, from scandals and internal divisions, Christianity continues to spread its message through new technologies while drawing on a deep well of history and tradition.

With its dignified courthouse set among shade trees and lawns dotted with monuments to prominent citizens and fallen veterans, the courthouse square remains the civic center in a majority of the county seats of Texas. Yet the squares themselves vary in form and layout, reflecting the different town-planning traditions that settlers brought from Europe, Mexico, and the United States. In fact, one way to trace settlement patterns and ethnic dispersion in Texas is by mapping the different types of courthouse squares.

This book offers the first complete inventory of Texas courthouse squares, drawn from extensive archival research and site visits to 139 of the 254 county seats. Robert Veselka classifies every existing plan by type and origin, including patterns and variants not previously identified. He also explores the social and symbolic functions of these plans as he discusses the historical and modern uses of the squares. He draws interesting new conclusions about why the courthouse square remains the hub of commercial and civic activity in the smaller county seats, when it has lost its prominence in others.

From the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century, vying armies have clashed over the territory stretching from the Upper Nile to modern-day Iraq and Iran. Crossroads of War captures five millennia of conflict and conquest in detailed full-color maps, accompanied by incisive, accessible commentary.

The lands of the Middle East were home to a succession of empires—Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian—that rose and declined with the fortunes of battle. Kings and generals renowned in history bestrode the region: Nebuchadnezzar, David, Alexander the Great, Saladin, Napoleon. The religions of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were born here and from the beginning became embroiled in conflicts ranging from the Maccabean Revolt to Muhammad’s Arabian conquests to the Christian Crusades. In the twentieth century, the Middle East witnessed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and played a role in the grim dramas of two world wars, as T. E. Lawrence helped spark the Arab Revolt and General Bernard Montgomery defeated Hitler’s Desert Fox, General Erwin Rommel, at El Alamein.

From the Yom Kippur War and Operation Desert Storm to a Global War on Terror that still looms over the twenty-first century, the Middle East continues to be shaped by the vagaries and vicissitudes of military conflict. Ian Barnes’s Crossroads of War offers valuable insights into the part of the world that first cradled civilization and then imagined its demise in a final clash of armies at Armageddon.

Among the great civilizations of the world, Islam remains an enigma to Western readers. Now, in a beautifully illustrated historical atlas, noted scholar of religion Malise Ruthven recounts the fascinating and important history of the Islamic world.

From the birth of the prophet Muhammed to the independence of post-Soviet Muslim states in Central Asia, this accessible and informative atlas explains the historical evolution of Islamic societies. Short essays cover a wide variety of themes, including the central roles played by sharia (divine law) and fiqh (jurisprudence); philosophy; arts and architecture; the Muslim city; trade, commerce, and manufacturing; marriage and family life; tribal distributions; kinship and dynastic power; ritual and devotional practices; Sufism; modernist and reformist trends; the European domination of the Islamic world; the rise of the modern national state; oil exports and arms imports; and Muslim populations in non-Muslim countries, including the United States.

Lucid and inviting full-color maps chronicle the changing internal and external boundaries of the Islamic world, showing the principal trade routes through which goods, ideas, and customs spread. Ruthven traces the impact of various Islamic dynasties in art and architecture and shows the distribution of sects and religious minorities, the structure of Islamic cities, and the distribution of resources. Among the book's valuable contributions is the incorporation of the often neglected geographical and environmental factors, from the Fertile Crescent to the North African desert, that have helped shape Islamic history.

Rich in narrative and visual detail that illuminates the story of Islamic civilization, this timely atlas is an indispensable resource to anyone interested in world history and religion.

Landscape has always played a vital role in shaping Japan’s cultural identity. Imaginative Mapping analyzes how intellectuals of the Tokugawa and Meiji eras used specific features and aspects of the landscape to represent their idea of Japan and produce a narrative of Japan as a cultural community. These scholars saw landscapes as repositories of local history and identity, stressing Japan’s differences from the models of China and the West.

By detailing the continuities and ruptures between a sense of shared cultural community that emerged in the seventeenth century and the modern nation state of the late nineteenth century, this study sheds new light on the significance of early modernity, one defined not by temporal order but rather by spatial diffusion of the concept of Japan. More precisely, Nobuko Toyosawa argues that the circulation of guidebooks and other spatial narratives not only promoted further movement but also contributed to the formation of subjectivity by allowing readers to imagine the broader conceptual space of Japan. The recurring claims to the landscape are evidence that it was the medium for the construction of Japan as a unified cultural body.

A new history of Brazil told through the lens of the often-overlooked interior regions.

In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain “clinging to the coastline, like crabs.” From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized. This divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s collective imagination, perpetuating the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil.

The Interior challenges these narratives and reexamines the history of Brazil using an “interior history” perspective. This approach aims to reverse the conventional conceptual and geographical boundaries often employed to study Brazilian history, and, by extension, Latin America as a whole. Through the work of twelve leading scholars, the volume highlights how the people and spaces within the interior have played a pivotal role in shaping national identities, politics, the economy, and culture. The Interior goes beyond the traditional boundaries of borderland and frontier history, expands on the current wave of scholarship on regionalism in Brazil, and, by asking new questions about space and nation, provides a fresh perspective on Brazil’s history.

    Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic explores the origins and lasting influences of two contesting but intertwined discourses that persist today when we use the words landscape, country, scenery, nature, national. In the first sense, the land is a physical and bounded body of terrain upon which the nation state is constructed (e.g., the purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain, from sea to shining sea). In the second, the country is constituted through its people and established through time and precedence (e.g., land where our fathers died, land of the Pilgrims’ pride). Kenneth Robert Olwig’s extended exploration of these discourses is a masterful work of scholarship both broad and deep, which opens up new avenues of thinking in the areas of geography, literature, theater, history, political science, law, and environmental studies.
    Olwig tracks these ideas though Anglo-American history, starting with seventeenth-century conflicts between the Stuart kings and the English Parliament, and the Stuart dream of uniting Scotland with England and Wales into one nation on the island of Britain. He uses a royal production of a Ben Jonson masque, with stage sets by architect Inigo Jones, as a touchstone for exploring how the notion of "landscape" expands from artful stage scenery to a geopolitical ideal. Olwig pursues these contested concepts of the body politic from Europe to America and to global politics, illuminating a host of topics, from national parks and environmental planning to theories of polity and virulent nationalistic movements.

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China, Mark Baker shows how different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries.

Pivot of China examines this dynamic through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of China’s urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a “National Central City” of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhou’s twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century.

Synthesizing almost thirty years of Dutch archaeological research in central and southern Italy, this book discusses and compares settlement and land use patterns from the late protohistoric period to the late Roman Republic. Considering both social and environmental factors, the authors analyze the long-term progression of indigenous Bronze Age tribal pastoralist societies towards the complexity of urbanized Roman society. Drawing on a decade of collaboration between Dutch and Italian researchers, this exhaustive study will be of great interest to students and scholars of Mediterranean archaeology.   

From the first Slavic migrations to the Romanovs’ rise to the Putin era, Russia has endured for centuries as a nation whose sheer size and diversity have challenged its rulers and shaped its identity. Restless Empire illuminates the epic sweep of Russian history in a beautifully illustrated full-color atlas depicting the essential cultural, political, economic, and military developments of Russia’s past.

Like the double-headed eagle that is its state emblem, Russia has always looked abroad to both the East and West, searching for secure trade routes, trustworthy allies, and defensible frontiers. Expansion beyond Muscovy’s forested confines began in the fifteenth century, when Ivan III rejected Mongol rule and moved into the Russian steppe. The waterways linking the Baltic to the Black and Caspian seas were crucial to Russia’s development from the Middle Ages onward. The age-old quest to acquire warm-water ports culminated in the construction of St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century, when imperial Russia began to rival Europe’s Great Powers.

From Ivan the Terrible to Catherine the Great, Lenin and Stalin to Yeltsin and Putin, Russia’s rulers have carved their nation’s destiny into world history, sometimes bending Russia toward despotism or democracy, internationalism or brusque independence. Russia’s titanic conflicts—against the Tatars and Turks, Napoleon, Nazi Germany, and the United States—and its political upheavals from the Time of Troubles to the Soviet Union’s downfall, as well as ongoing strife in Chechnya and Crimea, are presented chronologically in accessible text accompanied by detailed maps and illustrations.