Rethinking World History Essays On Europe Islam And World History

[Martta]

Iam currently retired, but still teach occasionally. I still teach upper division survey courses in the history of the modern world from 1450-1950. Over the last decade they have used histories of production and consumption as lenses to grasp the unfolding of the modern era. Over the last decade I also developed and taught an upper division survey course, "The Mediterranean in the Modern Age, 1492-1942," as well as a senior seminar, "The Mediterranean in the Cold War, 1942-1992.

I studied and taught in Italian universities before taking up my post at Oxford in 2017. I am an early modern historian with a strong interest in the experience of those who lived in the global empires of Spain and Portugal. In particular, the focus of my research and writing has been on imperial ideology, race, and slavery. I have extensively worked in archives and libraries in the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. My other major area of interest is in the Iberian religious world, with special regards to the Inquisition, mission, and the agency of converts. My latest book, The Globe on Paper (OUP, 2020), considers historiography as the centre of global interactions in the age of exploration. An examination of the cross-fertilisation of historical writing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it reconstructs a set of imaginative forms of account worked out from Mexico to the Moluccas and Peru, and from the shops of Venetian printers to the rival courts of Spain and England. This work, as much as the volume Machiavelli, Islam, and the East, which I co-edited with Lucio Biasiori (Palgrave, 2018), is part of an ongoing attempt to complicate current approaches to the geographies of the early modern world. I have never thought of my research topics in isolation. Ultimately, I see my scholarship as dealing with issues of power relations as diffracted through sources and materials produced at a time of change, instability, and weak legitimacy. I teach widely across the history of the early modern world (including specialised papers on Iberia and its overseas possessions), and I welcome enquiries from prospective graduate students interested in working in any aspect of Iberian history from 1450 to 1800.

I am one of the convenors of the Iberian History Seminar and the Reading Group on Iberian History (Medieval & Early Modern), both of which meet at Exeter College, and I greatly enjoy being part of a lively group of students and scholars interested in Iberian History at Oxford. Currently, I am also the Chair of the Oxford Centre for European History. I serve on the editorial board of several academic journals, including the Journal of Early Modern History.

I am also developing a project on the materiality of heresy in collaboration with Yonatan Glazer-Eytan (University of Cambridge). We are planning to write an article together and we have already organised the international conference Unsettling Objects: The Forgotten Archives of Material Culture in the Early Modern World, which took place in Cambridge in March 2022.

Moreover, new archival findings have persuaded me to return to an exceptional episode of same-sex marriages in late Renaissance Rome, which I studied in two articles published in Quaderni storici in 2010 and Historical Reflections in 2015. My current interest is specifically in the distortion of the memory of the events in the following century or so.

Finally, I am completing the revision a general history of the Inquisition in Portugal and its empire, which I co-authored with Jos Pedro Paiva (Universidade de Coimbra), for an English edition (forthcoming in the Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World series, Brill).

The book investigates the imaginative solutions that a variety of authors devised to rethink world history in the age of exploration. Based on extensive research into materials from the 16th and 17th centuries, this study restores the centrality that knowledge of the past had in the first global interaction. It explores the circulation of distinctive modes of historical writing across multiple languages and regions, how they influenced each other, the transformation they experienced in different contexts, as well as the challenge they posed to the authority of empire and religion.

This course provides an introduction to the international history of the early modern period by examining the complex political, religious, military and economic relationships between Europe and the wider world. The period between 1500 and 1800 enables the course to introduce students to a crucial period in international history. In political terms, it covers the rise of major dynastic states, with increasingly centralised institutions and concepts such as absolutism to promote the authority of the monarch, as well as the challenges to that authority and growing interest in political and social reform, culminating in the revolutions examined at the end of the course. Internationally, the period witnessed the gradual consolidation of leading European powers, as reflected in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), with formerly peripheral states emerging to challenge their position by the early eighteenth century. At the same time, the rise of major Islamic empires in Eurasia and the growing contact between Europe and the wider world provide students with important points of comparison between European and non-European states. The intellectual, religious and cultural developments of this period provide an important context for these major political events. The course will discuss the influence of key movements, such as the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, which re-ignited an interest in the Classical past and fostered a culture of rational enquiry into the natural world. Yet religion remained a vital component in the world-view of contemporaries, whether Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. This world-view was subject to challenges throughout the period, as during the Reformation, and often sought to impose its own orthodoxy, whether through religiously-motivated conflicts or the persecution / conversion of certain groups. The course seeks to familiarise students with some of the most important issues and current debates on these aspects of this period. While its scope is necessarily broad in nature, the course will help students to deal with the dynamics of continuity and change over a long period of time.

The third formative essay is a mock exam answer, which will be written by students as part of their revision during the Easter break, then graded by teachers and given written feedback in the first week of Summer Term.

Please note that during 2020/21 academic year some variation to teaching and learning activities may be required to respond to changes in public health advice and/or to account for the situation of students in attendance on campus and those studying online during the early part of the academic year. For assessment, this may involve changes to mode of delivery and/or the format or weighting of assessments. Changes will only be made if required and students will be notified about any changes to teaching or assessment plans at the earliest opportunity.

17 Hodgson defines historical complexes in the following way: "Whenever we find sequences of historical events interrelated in such a way that significant questions of substance (not, normally, abstract comparisons of categories) in regard to one of the sequences involves answers about all of them, we may regard what we have as a historical complex, whether it is a region with diverse cultural elements which closely interact (for instance, Buddhist-Hindu-Muslim Southeast Eurasia), or a single cultural tradition spread widely (for instance, Islamic culture From Java to the Niger), or a set of developments in a single tradition across many culture lines (for instance, The Greek-Arabic-Sanskrit-Chinese-Latin mathematical tradition)." Hodgson, Rethinking World History, 256-257.

21 It should be noted that there is movement towards world history by scholars in some area-based fields. This is especially true of historians dealing with issues of colonialism/imperialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In fact, scholars of Africa, such as Phil Curtin, Pat Manning, Ross Dunn, Walter Rodney and Immanuel Wallerstein have been especially instrumental in developing the field of world history.

The Medici Bank of Florence at its inception is the result of the demise of the city of Siena as the financial and banking centre of Italy. The European banking and finance sector in the pre and post-renaissance period cannot be known entirely without understanding the crucial underlying ideologies underpinning the financial and banking sector through the social doctrines of the Roman Church.

The history of the Medici Bank is quite clear that their loans to the royalty, traders, nobles, etc. were purely based on interest or usury. How did the Medici Bank keep the sin of usury away from its massive wealth accumulation by charging interests not only on its wealth but also on the wealth that it held for the Roman Church itself ?

While there are competing arguments for and against the approach to study ancient political theory through the study of the political canon, it remains undisputed[35] hat the study of political canon is the best way to define and comprehend the human evolution of political thought. The other criticism against the political canon is that it does not consider non-European political thought based on ancient Greek texts. This argument is based on the fact that the later translators of Latin and Greek canons chose to ignore the fact[36] that the basis of their work was the Arabic translations of the ancient Greek text themselves.

It was simply a matter of creating a historical narrative that would gloss over the influence of Eastern scholars on political canons themselves. In short, if the political canons are considered to be uniquely European, then it remains to be seen what the Eastern scholars have to say about the political thought based on ancient Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. This study does not go any further than the two Islamic scholars Avicenna and Averroes. Both scholars remain solidly pivotal in the re-introduction of Platonian and Aristotelian Greek philosophies during the European Renaissance[37]. The fallacy of the current historical narrative of the political canons being Western or European would fall apart also if one is to consider Averroism as a core philosophical concept amongst the leading scholars of political thought in the late 13th century Europe. However, if the political canons that are considered to be purely European accept the profound influence by the Islamic scholars such as Averroes, then it is a different story altogether. This defence of the proposition is beyond the scope of this paper. A most brilliant and comprehensive study on the topic has been conducted by Bullock[38] .

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