This volume intervenes in the growing field of transimperial history, which explores interactions across empires—European and non-European—between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s, a period of heightened imperial entanglement. It focuses on how actors from one empire came to know, interpret, and position themselves in relation to actors from other empires, emphasizing the role of socio-professional profiles, informal networks, and formal institutions. The volume is structured around three themes. First, it examines actors, including both individuals (e.g. a Chinese diplomat in Europe) and professional groups (e.g. journalists, military officers). Second, it analyzes formations of transimperial knowledge through diverse textual objects such as bank chops and travelogues, highlighting processes of commensurabilization. Third, it explores causes, noting how specific inter-imperial junctures and enabling factors—like language skills and institutional access—facilitated knowledge creation. Altogether, the volume sheds light on the concrete, situated ways in which transimperial knowledge was produced, mediated, and made meaningful in a competitive imperial world.

This volume intervenes in the growing field of transimperial history, which explores interactions across empires—European and non-European—between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s, a period of heightened imperial entanglement. It focuses on how actors from one empire came to know, interpret, and position themselves in relation to actors from other empires, emphasizing the role of socio-professional profiles, informal networks, and formal institutions. The volume is structured around three themes. First, it examines actors, including both individuals (e.g. a Chinese diplomat in Europe) and professional groups (e.g. journalists, military officers). Second, it analyzes formations of transimperial knowledge through diverse textual objects such as bank chops and travelogues, highlighting processes of commensurabilization. Third, it explores causes, noting how specific inter-imperial junctures and enabling factors—like language skills and institutional access—facilitated knowledge creation. Altogether, the volume sheds light on the concrete, situated ways in which transimperial knowledge was produced, mediated, and made meaningful in a competitive imperial world.

In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, Cyrus Schayegh takes up a fundamental problem historians face: how to make sense of the spatial layeredness of the past. He argues that the modern world’s ultimate socio-spatial feature was not the oft-studied processes of globalization or state formation or urbanization. Rather, it was fast-paced, mutually transformative intertwinements of cities, regions, states, and global circuits, a bundle of processes he calls transpatialization.

To make this case, Schayegh’s study pivots around Greater Syria (Bilad al-Sham in Arabic), which is roughly coextensive with present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine. From this region, Schayegh looks beyond, to imperial and global connections, diaspora communities, and neighboring Egypt, Iraq, and Turkey. And he peers deeply into Bilad al-Sham: at cities and their ties, and at global economic forces, the Ottoman and European empire-states, and the post-Ottoman nation-states at work within the region. He shows how diverse socio-spatial intertwinements unfolded in tandem during a transformative stretch of time, the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, and concludes with a postscript covering the 1940s to 2010s.