Cambridge World History : Patterns of Change

The era from 1400 to 1800 saw intense biological, commercial, and cultural exchanges, and the creation of global connections on an unprecedented scale. Divided into two books, Volume 6 of the Cambridge World History series considers these critical transformations. The first book examines the material and political foundations of the era, including global considerations of the environment, disease, technology, and cities, along with regional studies of empires in the eastern and western hemispheres, crossroads areas such as the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, and the Caribbean, and sites of competition and conflict, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The second book focuses on patterns of change, examining the expansion of Christianity and Islam, migrations, warfare, and other topics on a global scale, and offering insightful detailed analyses of the Columbian exchange, slavery, silver, trade, entrepreneurs, Asian religions, legal encounters, plantation economies, early industrialism, and the writing of history.

Jerry H. Bentley (1949–2012) was a Professor of History at the University of Hawaii, Mānoa. Educated at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and the University of Minnesota, his early research focused on Renaissance humanist scholarship of the Bible, but after coming to Hawaii in 1976 he emerged as one of the international leaders in world history scholarship and teaching. He published a wide range of articles on comparative and transnational methods in history and several books, including the seminal Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contact and Exchange in Pre-Modern Times (1993) and one of the most popular textbooks for teaching world history, Traditions and Encounters. He was the founding editor of the Journal of World History, and served as its editor-in-chief for twenty-two years, and was also a founding member of the World History Association in 1982. He developed standards and curriculum locally, nationally, and internationally, established a flourishing Ph.D. program in world history at the University of Hawaii, directed numerous seminars for scholars and teachers across the globe, and fostered a world history program at Capital Normal University in Beijing.

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is a Distinguished Professor of History, and the Navin and Pratima Doshi Endowed Chair in Pre-Modern Indian History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he served as founding Director of the Center for India and South Asia from 2005 to 2011. Educated at the University of Delhi and the Delhi School of Economics, he held positions at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at the University of Oxford before joining the UCLA faculty. In 2012, he received the Infosys Prize in the humanities, and in 2013, he was elected to the chair in Histoire Globale de la Première Modernité at the Collège de France in Paris. He was Joint Managing Editor of the Indian Economic and Social History Review for over a decade, besides serving on the boards of a number of other journals in the US, UK, France, Portugal, and elsewhere. He is the author or editor of many articles and nearly thirty books that have been translated into multiple languages, including The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History (1993), The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge, 1997), and Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries (Cambridge, 2007).

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She began her scholarly career as a historian of early modern Europe, with a particular focus on women and gender, and remains a leader in that field, serving as the president of three scholarly societies and since 1996 as the Senior Editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal. Since 2000 she has also moved into world and global history, and now serves as one of the editors of the Journal of Global History. She is the author or editor of twenty books and many articles that have appeared in English, German, Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean. These include Early Modern Europe 1450–1789, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 2013), Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 3rd edition (Cambridge, 2008), Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, 2nd edition (2010) and Gender in History: Global Perspectives, 2nd edition (2010). Her research has been supported by grants from the Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, among others.